Outreach and broader impacts – The M-Cube (M3) Project

2024

Oct. 2024. We have been continuing our efforts in supporting existing M-Cube users through online discussions and tutorials. In the past year, our collaboration with the M-Cube users has led to one funded NSF proposal and one under review.
Sep. 2024. NeuroRadar paper was selected into ACM GetMobile (top picks of the ACM SIGMOBILE area) and the Communications of the ACM Research Highlights.
May 2024. Our M-Cube software radio and the HybRadar platform was presented during the demo session of the San Diego 6G Wireless Summit, and received attention from many industry participants, including Qualcomm, Bell Labs, Samsung, etc.
Jan 2024. Two lead students in our M-Cube projects graduated and received their PhD degrees: Renjie Zhao who joined Johns Hopkins University as an Assistant Professor, and Timothy Woodford who joined MIT Lincoln Lab as a Research Scientist.

Nov. 2023. Our NeuroRadar paper received the Best Paper Award in ACM SenSys’23.
Aug. 2023. We held an M-Cube User Workshop on the UCSD campus, with around 18 in-person attendees and 6 online. During the workshop, we presented a 2-hour tutorial, providing hands-on instructions to the users for setting up the M-Cube software radio and using it to implement new communication or sensing algorithms. We have released the recorded tutorials online and shared them with all the users.
May 2023. Our team presented a demo at the industry demo session of the International Microwave Symposium held in San Diego in May 2023. We demonstrated the 28 GHz software radio/radar that we developed together with industry partner pSemi.

Dec. 2022. We have built LeoEM, an LEO satellite emulation platform that faithfully represents not only the LEO satnets but also the host OS, so any program can be natively run and evaluated over the dynamic links in real time.
May 2022. We presented our 28 GHz software radio platform in the 5G&Beyond Forum at the Center for Wireless Communications held at UCSD.
May 2022. As an extension to the M-Cube platform, we have built a 28 GHz software radio with a 16-element programmable phased array. We are currently coordinating with pSemi, the 28 GHz front-end vendor, to make the platform broadly available to the wireless communication and sensing research community.
We have been continuing distributing M-Cube replicas to research teams in the wireless networking and sensing area. Our research team has been actively serving the existing M-Cube users, by providing detailed documentation, one-on-one tutorial, online Q&A sessions, etc.

Oct. 2021. We have been distributing the M-Cube software radio to the research community and industry partners, through free equipment loans and paid fabrication services. As of Oct. 2021, 9 research institutions in the US and EU are using M-Cube in their mmWave sensing, communication, and networking projects. 5 other requisition requests are under processing.
Sep. 2021. We are starting a new collaboration project with pSemi to develop a 28 GHz software radio platform, using the M-Cube RFSoC module as a baseband processing unit.
July 2021. We have open-sourced the MVDNet dataset and model implementation (https://github.com/qiank10/MVDNet). MVDNet dataset represents the first radar-lidar dataset with accurate vehicle labels.
June 2021. 4 undergraduate students and 2 MS students are participating in the FPGA development of M-Cube this summer. They are partly supported by the Summer Research Internship Program (SRIP) at UCSD.
June 2021. We are setting up a collaboration project with Keysight and Safe Dynamics, and using our 3D ray tracing framework to reassure the RF safety of 5G mmWave networks.
Jan. 2021. We are collaborating with Samsung Research America to develop the RFSoC wideband processing unit for M-Cube.

Nov. 2020. We have demonstrated M-Cube to prominent industry representatives attending the annual review at the Center for Wireless Communications at UCSD.
Oct. 2020. M-Cube received the Best Paper Award at ACM MobiCom ’20 .
Sep. 2020. We are demonstrating our M-Cube platform in the upcoming ACM MobiCom ’20.
Aug. 2020. A first version of our 3D ray tracing code and data has been released. Check our project page for details.
Aug. 2020. First batch of M-Cube fabrication and assembly is done. We are distributing the units to other research institutions in the form of equipment transfer.
June 2020. 2 undergraduate students and 1 MS students are participating in the FPGA development for M-Cube. One of the undergraduate students is continuing towards the MS program at UCSD.