Professor Eltawil (EECE1997) has been recognized as Innovator of the year for 2021/2022 by the Henry Samueli School of Engineering at the University of California, Irvine, where the award is presented each year to the most innovative faculty member over the last three-year period. As per the award citation: “The Innovator Award is presented each year to an individual or team of faculty and/or researchers who best demonstrate innovation in the development of a product and/or technology originating from the UCI research enterprise. Innovation is defined as the act, process or product that creates a new dimension of performance. This award recognizes the achievements of an individual or team whose innovation has successfully translated the research emanating from our laboratories into new products and/or technologies that can be used by the public at large.”

Invention: Together with his research team, Professor Eltawil proposed a novel in-band Full Duplex (FD) scheme promoting highly spectral efficient communication systems. FD is a technology that allows communication devices to listen and broadcast simultaneously, on the same frequency, thus effectively doubling spectrum utilization. FD systems alleviate the problem of forcing radio systems to use separate frequency bands for bi-directional transmission, or taking turns in time, both of which are wasteful of resources, and result in complicated roll-out policies for new wireless technology. FD technology has the potential to change the way we access and utilize wireless content, releasing spectrum assets worth billions of dollars that can be redirected to create new opportunities.  

The research team led by Professor Eltawil was the first to show, through rigorous theoretical and experimental approaches, that using reconfigurable beam-steerable antennas to spatially filter out self-interference, leads to robust FD systems. Using digitally controlled beam-steering introduces additional degrees of freedom that can be exploited at the system level yielding high isolation between transmit and receive paths, and simplifying the deployment of FD systems.  Professor Eltawil’s academic publications in the area of FD alone have been cited over 1000 times, and he holds four US patents on the topic that have been cited by over 50 other patents including companies such as Qualcomm, LG, Airbus, Intel etc. and academic institutions such as MIT, UC and others.

Bio: Ahmed M. Eltawil is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) where he joined the Computer, Electrical and Mathematical Science and Engineering Division (CEMSE) in 2019. At KAUST, he is the founder and director of the Communication and Computing Systems Laboratory (CCSL). Prior to that he was with the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at the University of California, Irvine (UCI) from 2005-2019, where he was the founder of the Wireless Systems and Circuits Laboratory (WSCL). Professor Eltawil’s research is in the area of efficient architectures for computing and communications systems in general, and wireless systems in particular, spanning the application domains of low power mobile systems, sensor networks, cyber-physical systems (CPS) and critical infrastructure networks. He received the Doctorate degree from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2003 and the M.Sc. and B.Sc. degrees (with honors) from Cairo University, Giza, Egypt, in 1999 and 1997, respectively. Professor Eltawil has been on the technical program committees and steering committees for numerous workshops, symposia, and conferences in the areas of low power computing and wireless communication system design. He received several meritorious awards and grants, including the NSF CAREER grant supporting his research in low power computing and communication systems. He is a senior member of the IEEE and a senior member of the National Academy of Inventors, USA. For 2022, he was selected as “Innovator of the Year” by the Henry Samueli School of Engineering at the University of California, Irvine where he received US congressional recognition for his contributions. Professor Eltawil is a veteran of multiple startup in the area of communication technology, all of which have had significant translational research impact. His most recent company (Lextrum, founded 2015, acquired 2017) was created to commercialize Full-Duplex communication systems.

The EECE Dept. is proud to have one of its graduates achieve such an outstanding recognition. We wish Prof. Ahmed Eltawil continued success and look forward to hear more great news about his work and his contributions to the scientific world.