Igor Freire is an Electrical Engineer specialized in Digital Communications and Signal Processing. He received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the Federal University of Pará (Belém, Brazil) in 2020, where he researched clock synchronization algorithms for fifth-generation (5G) transport networks.
Since 2018, Igor has been the leading developer of the Blockstream Satellite project, a service providing Bitcoin blockchain synchronization worldwide through geostationary satellites. He was the principal author of a fully customized and software-defined physical layer implemented in C++/Python using the GNU Radio framework. His PHY design made history by conveying the first Bitcoin data transmissions through space, covering users on six continents for nearly three years.
As a Ph.D. student, he researched fronthaul networks of fifth-generation (5G) mobile communications, focusing primarily on clock synchronization over legacy Ethernet networks. He developed a sophisticated FPGA-based testbed and an extensive open-source framework to analyze synchronization based on the IEEE 1588 precision time protocol (PTP). His Ph.D. research work was funded by Ericsson Research and resulted in five conference papers and two journal papers. He also held a year-long internship at Blu Wireless in Bristol (UK), where he conducted the first published experiments of clock synchronization over 60 GHz millimeter-wave wireless systems.
Igor holds Ph.D., M.Sc., and B.Sc. degrees in electrical engineering. He was a visiting undergraduate student at the Michigan Technological University (USA) and holds extension certificates from universities such as the University of California, Irvine (USA). He has experience working with wireless communications standards such as DVB-S2, LTE, and IEEE 802.11ad, and strong programming skills in C, C++, Python, VHDL, and MATLAB.
