Dr. Garret Okamoto is
President of ACRi. He is responsible for design and evaluation of
beamforming, nulling and MIMO algorithms. He was a Research Engineer at
Argon ST (formerly SDRC) from 7/05 to 9/07. At SDRC he was PI for the ONR
program on MIMO LPI/LPD/AJ Communications in Highly Mobile Networks,
technical lead for MIMO, baseband/PHY, and beamforming for SDRC's DARPA WANN
Radio team, and was responsible for AJ beamforming for DARPA TrACC. From
1998-2005 he was an Assistant Professor at Santa Clara University, serving
as Director of the Communications and Microwaves Laboratory and coordinator
of the graduate Communications program. He was Member of Engineering Staff
at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory from 1991-1998, earning a Commendation for
Superior Performance and a NASA Honor Award from projects such as Mars
Pathfinder (he designed and implemented hardware and software for
coding/decoding/data verification) and Galileo Optical Experiment (created
and integrated laser transmission and monitoring systems). He received his
B.S. in Electrical & Computer Engineering from the University of Texas at
Austin in 1990, M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in
1991, and Ph.D. in Electrical & Computer Engineering from the University of
Texas at Austin in 1998.
He has worked on beamforming
design and implementation issues for commercial and defense systems for 13
years, with over 30 published papers focused on smart antennas, beamforming,
and interference mitigation. His pioneering book entitled "Smart Antenna
Systems and Wireless LANs" contained the first comprehensive study of
beamforming algorithms including theoretical analysis, simulations, and OTA
measurements for a variety of algorithms. The book discussed the setup and
results from experimental testbeds operating at 800 MHz, 900 MHz and 1.9
GHz. The lessons learned from the 900 MHz testbed resulted in a major
revision of the simulations and implementation of the 1.9 GHz testbed, with
the OTA results closely matching the performance predicted by the theory and
simulations. He built on that beamforming experience and his background of
applied research at SDRC, with end-to-end simulation results in close
agreement with OTA measurements from SDRC's 2.4 GHz testbed with and without
a jammer present.
Dr. Chih-Wei Chen is ACRi's Senior Research Engineer and the inventor of the Non-Eigen Decomposition Blind Beamforming Algorithm. He is responsible for research into beamforming and nulling algorithms, just as he was for PieStorm, Inc. and as a member of Dr. Okamoto's research group at SCU. He received an M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from National Central University (Taiwan) in 1991 and an M.S. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Santa Clara University in 1998 and 2005, respectively. From 6/05 to 7/06, he was the Principal Engineer at smart antenna startup AirRay Systems. From 7/06 until 7/09 he was a Hardware and System Engineer at the SoC Technology Center in the Industrial Technology Research Institute, where he went from systems engineering in MATLAB to designing key components of their WiMAX product to leading a chip design team who tested the design in an FPGA and implemented it in a 90 nm chip now shipping commercially. Chen also designed the entire physical layer control flow and led the verification and debugging for those algorithms. Taking algorithms all the way through to the commercial product gave Chen extremely valuable experience and skills that are valuable to ACRi. Chen provides valuable research expertise combined with recent commercialization experience.
Ben Horwath
Ben Horwath is ACRi's Director of Business Development. Ben founded smart antenna startup AirRay Systems and from 8/05-2/08 led all strategic planning, systems design and business development efforts, engaging top-tier companies including Motorola, Intel, Apple, Atheros and Broadcom for partnership and funding. Formerly, he was a key member of the product development, marketing and sales team at Phaethon Communications, initiating and supporting customer accounts and managing 30 optical networking OEMs (including Cisco, Nortel, Lucent, Fujitsu, Huawei, and Agilent). He had several roles at Corning from 6/95-9/00, including Technology Transfer Engineer and Manufacturing Capacity Analyst. Ben will be responsible for marketing, sales and product development at ACRi. A key advantage for Ben over other marketing experts is that he studied under Okamoto at SCU and he and Chen used beamforming for commercial applications at AirRay. Consequently, he will be more effective because he understands the technology and has already received feedback from many top-tier commercial companies on their needs and applications that NED is suited for. He earned an M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Santa Clara University in 2004 and a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Pennsylvania State University in 1997.
