Versatile RF Interconnects and Electronics for Extreme Environmental Sensing and Communications

ABSTRACT

Future emerging applications like extreme environment electronics, high-performance computing, space sensing, and brain-machine interfaces share a critical goal: massive bandwidth and deployment scalability. To this end, my research group is investigating energy-efficient and scalable sensing and communication techniques, emphasizing circuits, advanced packaging, and signal processing innovations for the above applications. To begin with, I will briefly discuss technology gaps in information-carrying wiring harnesses and illustrate the new use cases of millimeter-wave dielectric fibers and short-distance wireless interconnects as alternative mediums, mainly as thermal isolating channels. Then, I will discuss the need for large-scale cryogenic interconnects for future high-performance computing and demonstrate the potential adoption of wireless interconnects between cryogenic devices and room-temperature electronics. As an initiative, our lab demonstrated the feasibility of removing thermally loaded wires/connectors between 7K and 290K thermal break and efficiently packing more data in a millimeter-wave carrier enabled by multi-level signaling and digital pre-distortion in CMOS technologies. As a part of the scalable interconnect theme within high-performance computing, I will also describe my collaborative efforts with academic and industry partners on massively scalable RF connectors for future artificial intelligence and data centers. Lastly, I will elaborate further on my research activities in space sensing and communications, where massive scalability

BIOGRAPHY

Rod Kim graduated from UCLA with a Ph.D. in electrical engineering. He is an assistant professor at the Stevens Institute of Technology and a research associate at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Before that, he developed low-noise sensors and communication systems using CMOS technologies at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and space-based power-beaming receivers at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL). Rod designed the first CMOS-centric 183-GHz heterodyne spectrometers in JPL’s balloon instrument that successfully measured the water vapor spectral line in the Earth’s stratosphere. He has been an associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Microwave Theory and Techniques since 2022 and a track editor for the IEEE Journal of Microwaves since 2025.