According to a recent analysis of
Essential Science IndicatorsSMfrom
Thomson
Reuters, the work of Dr. Kin-Lu Wong had the
highest percent
increase in
total citations in the field of Engineering. Dr.
Wong's current record in this field includes 71 papers
cited a total of 979 times between January 1, 1999 and
August 31, 2009.
Dr. Wong is the Sun Yat-Sen Chair Professor of the
Electrical Engineering Department at the National Sun
Yat-Sen University in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, where he also
serves as the Vice President for Academic Affairs. He
is also an IEEE Fellow and a Distinguished Research
Fellow of the National Science Council.
In the interview
below, ScienceWatch.com talks with Dr. Wong about
his highly cited work.
Please tell us a bit about your educational
background and research experience—particularly what drew you to
your current field.
I received my B.S. degree in electrical engineering from National Taiwan
University, Taiwan, and my M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering
from Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas, USA, in 1981, 1984, and 1986,
respectively.
My
graduate
students.
internal
WWAN antenna applied to
a mobile phone with a
short ground
plane
From 1986 to 1987, I was a visiting scientist with Max-Planck-Institute for
Plasma Physics in Munich, Germany. Since 1987 I have been with the
Department of Electrical Engineering, National Sun Yat-Sen University
(NSYSU), Kaohsiung, Taiwan, where I became a Professor in 1991. From 1998
to 1999, I was a Visiting Scholar with the ElectroScience Laboratory, The
Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, USA.
In 2005, I was elected to be the Sun Yat-Sen Chair Professor of NSYSU, the
highest honor in NSYSU. I also served as Chairman of the Electrical
Engineering Department from 1994 to 1997, Dean of the Office of Research
Affairs from 2005 to 2008, and now as Vice President for Academic Affairs,
NSYSU (2007~).
I have published more than 450 refereed journal papers and 230 conference
articles and has personally supervised 47 graduated Ph.D.s. I also hold
over 100 patents, including U.S., Taiwan, China, Korean, and European
patents, and have many other patents pending. I am the author of Design
of Nonplanar Microstrip Antennas and Transmission Lines (New York:
Wiley, 1999), Compact and Broadband Microstrip Antennas (New York:
Wiley, 2002), and Planar Antennas for Wireless Communications (New
York: Wiley, 2003).
In 2008, the research achievements of Handheld Wireless Communication
Devices Antenna Design of the NSYSU Antenna Lab, which I led, were
selected to be one of the top 50 scientific achievements of the National
Science Council of Taiwan in past 50 years (1959~2009).
I am an IEEE Fellow and received the Outstanding Research Award three times
from the National Science Council of Taiwan in 1994, 2000 and 2002, and was
elevated to be a Distinguished Research Fellow of National Science Council
in 2005.
I started my current research on small and wideband antennas for mobile
communication devices, such as the handset and laptop computers, in 1999.
At that time, mobile communications had started to boom and the internal
antennas for applications in the mobile communication devices were becoming
a very important design issue for achieving good communication qualities.
The communications industry is also in great demand in new internal mobile
device antennas with small size and wideband operation. This draws me to my
current research field on the small and wideband internal mobile device
antenna design.
One of your most-cited papers is the 2003 IEEE T.
Antenn. Propag. paper, "Printed double-T monopole antenna for
2.4/5.2 GHz dual-band WLAN operations," (Kuo YL, Wong KL, 51[9]:
2187-92, September 2003). Would you talk a bit about this
study—what you set out to find, what the results were, and why
the paper is significant?
This paper reports a simple printed antenna for dual-band WLAN operation.
The proposed antenna is easy to fabricate and has a low profile for mobile
device applications. In addition, this study reports the important effects
of varying the antenna dimensions for achieving widened bandwidth. The
ground plane effects on the antenna performances are also studied, which
leads to the important conclusion that the ground plane effects on the
antenna performances should be taken into consideration in the mobile
device antenna design.
Another of your highly cited papers is a 2005 paper in
the same journal, "Ultrawide-band square planar metal-plate monopole
antenna with a trident-shaped feeding strip," (Wong KL, Wu CH, Su SW,
53[4]: 1262-9, April 2005)—would you talk a bit about this
paper?
"Small size and wideband operation
are the most demanding design issue for the
internal mobile device antenna, although
small size and wideband operation are usually
in conflict."
This paper reports an ultra-wideband (UWB) antenna that shows good vertical
polarization purity over the obtained UWB band. The polarization purity is
important to achieve good communication quality in the UWB communications.
This paper is among the very few studies that report promising solutions to
achieve good polarization purity for frequencies over a very wide bandwidth
of larger than 10 GHz.
More recently, you published another paper in this
journal, "Multiband printed monopole slot antenna for WWAN operation
in the laptop computer," (Wong KL, Lee LC, 57[2]: 324-30, February
2009). Would you tell our readers a little about this
research?
This paper reports an all-printing internal laptop computer antenna which
shows small size and wideband operation covering GSM850/900/1800/1900/UMTS
bands. This antenna is especially suitable for the thin-profile laptop
computer applications. This reported antenna is the first one in using the
monopole slot elements for achieving WWAN operation in the laptop computer.
It demonstrates that the monopole slot element can be applied in the laptop
computer as an internal antenna. This leads to more flexibility in
designing the internal laptop computer antennas.
What would you say is the most challenging aspects of
your work? The most rewarding?
The most challenging aspect of my study is to achieve an antenna with a
smaller size yet wider operating band. Small size and wideband operation
are the most demanding design issue for the internal mobile device antenna,
although small size and wideband operation are usually in conflict. And the
most rewarding is that some of our antenna designs have been applied in
practical handsets and laptop computers. Also, our graduated students are
very welcomed in the industry, and every one of them received good job
offers before their graduation.
Kin-Lu Wong, IEEE Fellow
Electrical Engineering Department
National Sun Yat-Sen University
Kaohsiung, Taiwan