Dr Francesco Fornetti

Summary

Dr Francesco Fornetti received his MEng Degree in Electrical & Electronic Engineering from the University of Bristol in 2003. He subsequently worked as a control systems engineer at Rolls-Royce Plc civil aviation division and at Motorola Networks as a Radio Frequency Engineer.

He returned to the University of Bristol in October 2006 to begin a CASE award PhD partially funded by MBDA Missile Systems. During his PhD, which he completed in December 2010, he investigated the suitability of Gallium Nitride (GaN) HEMTs (High Electron Mobility Transistors) to microwave power amplifiers for Radar and pulsed applications.

He subsequently spent 12 months as a Research Assistant on a Knowledge transfer secondment with MBDA. During his secondment he provided the company with similar test and characterisation facilities to the ones that he devised in Bristol, considerably enhanced their capabilities and pushed their frequency of operation to 15GHz.

Dr Fornetti spent 3 months at the University of Sydney in early 2010 on a Worldwide University Network (WUN) research mobility scholarship. During this time he worked on device-level characterisation of GaN devices and established a strong relationship with the Universities of Sydney and Macquarie.  He also collaborated with Prof Lucas of Sydney University on the teaching of Radio Frequency and Microwave Engineering and introduced and demonstrated a new simulator software AWR Microwave Office,  to the course.

Dr Fornetti is passionate about making Radio Frequency and Microwave Engineering accessible and understandable and has worked extensively on new ways to teach the subject aided by simulation. To this end he has created his own YouTube channel and is a prolific contributor to AWR’s University Channel. In addition Dr Fornetti has a considerable amount of expertise on instrumentation control and data acquisition through MatLab and its Instrument Control Toolbox and has collaborated closely with major instrumentation manufacturers such as LeCroy and Rohde & Schwarz. He is also a contributor on the MathWorks file exchange website.

View a selection of Francesco Fornetti's publications

Memberships

Organisations

Department of Electrical & Electronic Engineering

Research Groups

• Communication Systems and Networks

Links

• Communication Systems & Networks research group
• Centre for Communications Research (CCR)

Recent publications

• Fornetti, F, Morris, K & Beach, M 2009, ‘Pulsed operation and performance of commercial GaN HEMTs’. in: 39th European Microwave Integrated Circuits Conference, 2009 (EuMIC 2009), Rome, Italy. Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), pp. 226 - 229
• Fornetti, F, Beach, M & Morris, K 2009, ‘Time and frequency domain analysis of commercial GaN HEMTs operated in pulsed mode’. in: IEEE Asia Pacific Microwave Conference, 2009 (APMC 2009), Singapore. Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), pp. 1601 - 1604
• Fornetti, F, Morris, K & Beach, M 2009, ‘Evaluation of commercial GaN HEMTs for pulsed power applications’. in: IET European Pulsed Power Conference, 2009, Geneva, Switzerland. Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET), pp. 1 - 4
• Cryan, M, Dragas, M, Kung, J, Jain, V, Fornetti, F, Houle, T, Varrazza, R & Hill, M 2006, ‘A 2.4-GHz wireless-over-fiber transceiver using photonic active integrated antennas (PhAIAs)’. Microwave and Optical Technology Letters, vol 48 (2)., pp. 233 - 237

View complete publications list in the University of Bristol publications system