At Northeastern’s Kostas Research Institute (KRI), researchers have developed antenna technology with the potential to reshape the design of radar, sensing, and communication systems across defense and commercial markets.
Through a partnership managed by Northeastern’s Center for Research Innovation (CRI ) and the Senior Vice President for Research, that technology is moving toward real-world application. Re:Build Manufacturing, an advanced manufacturing platform focused on restoring American production in strategic technology sectors, has entered a validation partnership with Northeastern to test, refine, and prepare the technology for commercial deployment quickly while minimizing risk.
“We solve the ‘valley of death’ problem — that critical gap between laboratory innovation and commercial-scale manufacturing,” says Shawn Williams of Re:Build Manufacturing. “What sets us apart is our focus on taking promising technologies and making them manufacturable, scalable, and commercially viable here in the US.”
Rethinking Antenna Design
The technology at the center of the partnership is a Dielectric Resonator Antenna (DRA), a three-dimensional antenna that uses specialized ceramic and polymer materials in place of the metal conductors found in conventional antenna designs.
At high frequencies, metal antennas lose a significant share of their energy as heat. DRAs do not, which lets them stay efficient across an exceptionally wide frequency range while remaining compact enough to integrate directly onto semiconductor chips.
The most advanced version, developed at Northeastern over the past eighteen months, has further advantages. Known as PA⁴, or the Pixelated Aperture Antenna Array Approach, it packs multiple independent radiating elements into the same footprint where a conventional array places just one.
“This achieves unprecedented miniaturization while fully maintaining bandwidth and efficiency,” says Kristi Pance, Principal R&D Engineer at KRI. “It introduces advanced beam-forming capabilities within remarkably compact spaces, enabling performance levels that were simply not possible with any previously existing antenna technology.”
Antennas built this way can transmit and receive substantially more data, opening the door to a new generation of tracking radars, automotive sensing systems, and diagnostic imaging tools.
“The technology is far more than an incremental improvement,” Pance says. “It is an entirely new approach to antenna design with the potential to revolutionize radar systems across all applications.”
Earlier generations of the array architecture have been validated through prototypes and real-world testing. Several patent applications covering the newest PA⁴ designs have been filed through CRI.
Validating Technology for Broad, Real-World Use Cases
The team is currently conducting a four-month validation program testing the technology across performance, manufacturability, and system integration. The goal is to prove that the arrays deliver high-gain, efficient operation and that the pixelated designs are repeatable, scalable, and compatible with real-world fabrication processes.
“Success means de-risking the technology,” Pance says. “Proving that it performs as designed, can be built reliably and consistently, and offers clear and compelling advantages over existing approaches in practical defense and commercial systems.”
Re:Build is evaluating the technology across a broad range of use cases, including communications, aerospace and defense, autonomy and mobility, sensing, and imaging applications. The team anticipates seeing the technology in initial commercial use within eighteen months, and is committed to manufacturing in the United States.
A New Pathway from Research to Commercialization
CRI managed the commercialization partnership, working with KRI to structure an agreement that protects Northeastern’s intellectual property while giving Re:Build the access it needs to evaluate the technology.
For Re:Build, the fit was immediate. “Northeastern’s focus on use-inspired technology — innovation grounded in real-world application — resonates deeply with our belief that theory must serve practice,” Williams says. The result, he adds, “made this feel less like a vendor relationship and more like bringing together teammates who share a common mission.”
For Pance, the partnership does something academic research alone could not. It accelerates “the transition from prototype to market-ready products,” he says, and positions DRA arrays “as genuine industry disruptors, rather than simply promising academic concepts waiting to be realized.”
The partnership is supported by a new technology validation agreement framework developed at Northeastern. This short-term, funded structure lets a company demonstrate the commercial viability of a university technology before committing to a full license, while Northeastern retains ownership of the underlying IP.
“The Technology Validation Agreement is a creative new mechanism to enable Northeastern innovation to exit the laboratory and cross the Valley of Death,” says David Luzzi, Senior Vice President for Research at Northeastern. “I believe the contract structure we created will be an important item in the toolbox for CRI and our fantastic researchers.”
To explore how CRI advances Northeastern research into real-world applications, visit cri.northeastern.edu.