Altair once again invites engineering students from across the globe to participate in the 16th annual FEKO® Student Competition. The competition seeks under-graduate and post-graduate students who have worked on a supervised project in electromagnetic engineering using FEKO, Altair's comprehensive electromagnetic (EM) analysis software suite. 

Ke Li, a first year Ph.D. student from Xidian University in China, was announced the 2017 winner of the FEKO Student Competition. Ms. Li’s winning entry, entitled "Wideband MIMO Handset Antennas based on Theory of Characteristic Modes," covers a dual MIMO antenna design for a smartphone operating in the LTE 13, GSM850 and GSM900 bands. Typically, it is challenging to achieve good MIMO performance due to the limited space available for good element separation as well as the wide bandwidth that is required. FEKO's characteristic mode analysis was used to optimize the element placement and feeding, which enabled the desired modes to be excited on the ground plane. This in turn resulted in good pattern diversity and excellent ECC across the bands. The design was built, S11 and gain were measured, which agreed very well with the simulation results. 

“I feel so excited and am very grateful for this award. I would like to thank the judges for recognizing my work, giving me great encouragement for my future career,” said Ms. Li when receiving the news of her win. “As a student majoring in electromagnetics, the FEKO software gives us so many resources and tools to solve EM problems.” 

Offering attractive prizes like a state-of-the-art laptop computer or attendance to an Altair Technology Conference, the Altair competition is an ideal opportunity for students to showcase their work with FEKO. The winner will also have the opportunity to host a webinar to present their project, exposing them to a much larger audience. This will serve as very useful experience for their future engineering careers. 

“A huge success for the last 15 years, the annual FEKO student competition provides an excellent opportunity to students interested in antennas, microwave devices, bio-electromagnetics and EMC to showcase their work and demonstrate the complexity and accuracy of the results achieved using FEKO versus real-world results,” said Matthias Goelke, senior director, Business Development Academic Markets at Altair. “This is truly an international competition; the 2015 winner was from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the U.S., our 2016 winner from Curtin University in Australia and the 2017 winner hailed from Xidian University in China.”

The deadline for entries is November 30, 2018. Once students register for the competition, they will receive further details on requirements, links to support forums and guides.