Seminar Details
2026-04-08 (09:00) : From Beyond-Diagonal Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces to Analog Computing for Communications and Signal Processing
At Shannon Room
Organized by Electrical Engineering
Speaker :
Bruno Clerckx (Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering - Imperial College London, South Kensington Campus)
Abstract :
Modern systems rely on digital circuits, computing, and signal processors that operate on binary values, offering advantages such as precision, versatility, robustness. Yet, digital processors face major limitations as high power consumption and limited speed. Despite digital signal processing being widely adopted today, analog computing is attracting a renewed interest thanks to its ability to perform energy-efficient and massively parallelized computations.
The talk shows two promising avenues to devise new, faster, and more sustainable communication and signal processing architectures that marry the communication theoretic principles of modern digital communications with analog domain processing and computing paradigms such that information transmission, processing and computing are conducted faster with much lower computational complexity.
First, we introduce Beyond-Diagonal Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (BD-RIS), a general framework of reconfigurable intelligent surfaces where elements are inter-connected via tunable impedances. This enables engineered coupling, allowing waves to propagate between elements, enhancing RIS-aided communications with greater signal manipulation flexibility.
Next, we introduce the concept of Microwave Linear Analog Computer (MiLAC) as a very general model of a computer exploiting the propagation of analog signals in a microwave network, offering exceptionally low computational complexity - unimaginable with conventional digital computers. We show that MiLAC can perform computation, e.g. matrix inversion and linear minimum mean square error estimation, with low complexity directly in the analog domain and enable new future MIMO communications with 10⁴× lower computational complexity than digital processing.
The increasing research interest in those areas is reflected by the Special Interest Groups on BD-RIS https://sites.google.com/view/ieee-comsoc-rcc-sig-bdris and on Analog Computing https://sites.google.com/view/sig-analog-computing in the IEEE Communications Society.
Bio:
Bruno Clerckx is a Full Professor and the Head of the Communications and Signal Processing Group at Imperial College London, London, U.K. He received the MSc and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium, and the Doctor of Science (DSc) degree from Imperial College London, U.K. He spent many years in industry with Silicon Austria Labs (SAL), Austria, where he was the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) responsible for all research areas of Austria's top research center for electronic based systems and with Samsung Electronics, South Korea, where he actively contributed to 4G (3GPP LTE/LTE-A and IEEE 802.16m). He has authored two books on “MIMO Wireless Communications” and “MIMO Wireless Networks”, over 350 peer-reviewed international research papers, and 150 standards contributions, and is the inventor of over 80 issued patents among which several have been adopted in the specifications of 4G and 5G standards and are used by billions of devices worldwide. His research spans the general area of wireless communications and signal processing for wireless networks. He received the Blondel Medal 2021 from France for exceptional work contributing to the progress of Science and Electrical and Electronic Industries, the 2022 Adolphe Wetrems Prize in mathematical and physical sciences and the 2025 Georges Vanderlinden Prize in Electromagnetism and Telecommunications from Royal Academy of Belgium, multiple awards from Samsung, IEEE best student paper award, IEEE Globecom 2025 best paper award, and the EURASIP (European Association for Signal Processing) best paper award 2022. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and the IET. He is the vice-chair of ETSI Industry Specification Group (ISG) on Multiple Access Techniques (MAT).
The talk shows two promising avenues to devise new, faster, and more sustainable communication and signal processing architectures that marry the communication theoretic principles of modern digital communications with analog domain processing and computing paradigms such that information transmission, processing and computing are conducted faster with much lower computational complexity.
First, we introduce Beyond-Diagonal Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (BD-RIS), a general framework of reconfigurable intelligent surfaces where elements are inter-connected via tunable impedances. This enables engineered coupling, allowing waves to propagate between elements, enhancing RIS-aided communications with greater signal manipulation flexibility.
Next, we introduce the concept of Microwave Linear Analog Computer (MiLAC) as a very general model of a computer exploiting the propagation of analog signals in a microwave network, offering exceptionally low computational complexity - unimaginable with conventional digital computers. We show that MiLAC can perform computation, e.g. matrix inversion and linear minimum mean square error estimation, with low complexity directly in the analog domain and enable new future MIMO communications with 10⁴× lower computational complexity than digital processing.
The increasing research interest in those areas is reflected by the Special Interest Groups on BD-RIS https://sites.google.com/view/ieee-comsoc-rcc-sig-bdris and on Analog Computing https://sites.google.com/view/sig-analog-computing in the IEEE Communications Society.
Bio:
Bruno Clerckx is a Full Professor and the Head of the Communications and Signal Processing Group at Imperial College London, London, U.K. He received the MSc and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium, and the Doctor of Science (DSc) degree from Imperial College London, U.K. He spent many years in industry with Silicon Austria Labs (SAL), Austria, where he was the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) responsible for all research areas of Austria's top research center for electronic based systems and with Samsung Electronics, South Korea, where he actively contributed to 4G (3GPP LTE/LTE-A and IEEE 802.16m). He has authored two books on “MIMO Wireless Communications” and “MIMO Wireless Networks”, over 350 peer-reviewed international research papers, and 150 standards contributions, and is the inventor of over 80 issued patents among which several have been adopted in the specifications of 4G and 5G standards and are used by billions of devices worldwide. His research spans the general area of wireless communications and signal processing for wireless networks. He received the Blondel Medal 2021 from France for exceptional work contributing to the progress of Science and Electrical and Electronic Industries, the 2022 Adolphe Wetrems Prize in mathematical and physical sciences and the 2025 Georges Vanderlinden Prize in Electromagnetism and Telecommunications from Royal Academy of Belgium, multiple awards from Samsung, IEEE best student paper award, IEEE Globecom 2025 best paper award, and the EURASIP (European Association for Signal Processing) best paper award 2022. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and the IET. He is the vice-chair of ETSI Industry Specification Group (ISG) on Multiple Access Techniques (MAT).