A Frequency-Reconfigurable Monopole Antenna with Switchable Stubbed Ground Structure

A frequency-reconfigurable coplanar-waveguide (CPW) fed monopole antenna using switchable stubbed ground structure is presented. Four PIN diodes are employed in the stubs stretching from the ground to make the antenna reconfigurable in three operating modes: a single-band mode (2.4-2.9 GHz), a dual-band mode (2.4-2.9 GHz/5.09-5.47 GHz) and a triple-band mode (3.7-4.26 GHz/5.3-6.3 GHz/8.0-8.8 GHz). The monopole antenna is resonating at 2.4 GHz, while the stubs produce other operating frequency bands covering a number of wireless communication systems, including WLAN, WiMAX, C-band, and ITU. Furthermore, an optimized biasing network has been integrated into this antenna, which has little influence on the performance of the antenna. This paper presents, compares and discusses the simulated and measured results

Application of Memristors in Microwave Passive Circuits

The recent implementation of the fourth fundamental electric circuit element, the memristor, opened new vistas in many fields of engineering applications. In this paper, we explore several RF/microwave passive circuits that might benefit from the memristor salient characteristics. We consider a power divider, coupled resonator bandpass filters, and a low-reflection quasi-Gaussian lowpass filter with lossy elements. We utilize memristors as configurable linear resistors and we propose memristor-based bandpass filters that feature suppression of parasitic frequency pass bands and widening of the desired rejection band. The simulations are performed in the time domain, using LTspice, and the RF/microwave circuits under consideration are modeled by ideal elements available in LTspice

Baseband analog front-end and digital back-end for reconfigurable multi-standard terminals

Multimedia applications are driving wireless network operators to add high-speed data services such as Edge (E-GPRS), WCDMA (UMTS) and WLAN (IEEE 802.11a,b,g) to the existing GSM network. This creates the need for multi-mode cellular handsets that support a wide range of communication standards, each with a different RF frequency, signal bandwidth, modulation scheme etc. This in turn generates several design challenges for the analog and digital building blocks of the physical layer. In addition to the above-mentioned protocols, mobile devices often include Bluetooth, GPS, FM-radio and TV services that can work concurrently with data and voice communication. Multi-mode, multi-band, and multi-standard mobile terminals must satisfy all these different requirements. Sharing and/or switching transceiver building blocks in these handsets is mandatory in order to extend battery life and/or reduce cost. Only adaptive circuits that are able to reconfigure themselves within the handover time can meet the design requirements of a single receiver or transmitter covering all the different standards while ensuring seamless inter-interoperability. This paper presents analog and digital base-band circuits that are able to support GSM (with Edge), WCDMA (UMTS), WLAN and Bluetooth using reconfigurable building blocks. The blocks can trade off power consumption for performance on the fly, depending on the standard to be supported and the required QoS (Quality of Service) leve

A 36 µW 1.1 mm2 reconfigurable analog front-end for cardiovascular and respiratory signals recording

© 2018 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting /republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other worksThis paper presents a 1.2 V 36 µW reconfigurable analog front-end (R-AFE) as a general-purpose low-cost IC for multiple-mode biomedical signals acquisition. The R-AFE efficiently reuses a reconfigurable preamplifier, a current generator (CG), and a mixed signal processing unit, having an area of 1.1 mm2 per R-AFE while supporting five acquisition modes to record different forms of cardiovascular and respiratory signals. The R-AFE can interface with voltage-, current-, impedance-, and light-sensors and hence can measure electrocardiography (ECG), bio-impedance (BioZ), photoplethysmogram (PPG), galvanic skin response (GSR), and general-purpose analog signals. Thanks to the chopper preamplifier and the low-noise CG utilizing dynamic element matching, the R-AFE mitigates 1/f noise from both the preamplifier and the CG for improved measurement sensitivity. The IC achieves competitive performance compared to the state-of-the-art dedicated readout ICs of ECG, BioZ, GSR, and PPG, but with approximately 1.4×-5.3× smaller chip area per channel.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Reconfiguration based built-in self-test for analogue front-end circuits

Previous work has shown that it is feasible to implement a fully digital test evaluation function to realise partial self-test on an automatic gain control circuit (AGC). This paper extends the technique to INL, DNL, offset & gain error testing of analogue to digital converters (ADC's). It also shows how the same function can be used to test an AGC / ADC pair. An extension to full self-test is also proposed by the on-chip generation of input stimuli through reconfiguration of existing functions

Thermal phase shifters for femtosecond laser written photonic integrated circuits

Photonic integrated circuits (PICs) are today acknowledged as an effective solution to fulfill the demanding requirements of many practical applications in both classical and quantum optics. Phase shifters integrated in the photonic circuit offer the possibility to dynamically reconfigure its properties in order to fine tune its operation or to produce adaptive circuits, thus greatly extending the quality and the applicability of these devices. In this paper, we provide a thorough discussion of the main problems that one can encounter when using thermal shifters to reconfigure photonic circuits. We then show how all these issues can be solved by a careful design of the thermal shifters and by choosing the most appropriate way to drive them. Such performance improvement is demonstrated by manufacturing thermal phase shifters in femtosecond laser written PICs (FLW-PICs), and by characterizing their operation in detail. The unprecedented results in terms of power dissipation, miniaturization and stability, enable the scalable implementation of reconfigurable FLW-PICs that can be easily calibrated and exploited in the applications

Analog Computing using 1T1R Crossbar Arrays

Memristor is a novel passive electronic device and a promising candidate for new generation non-volatile memory and analog computing. Analog computing based on memristors has been explored in this study. Due to the lack of commercial electrical testing instruments for those emerging devices and crossbar arrays, we have designed and built testing circuits to implement analog and parallel computing operations. With the setup developed in this study, we have successfully demonstrated image processing functions utilizing large memristor crossbar arrays. We further designed and experimentally demonstrated the first memristor based field programmable analog array (FPAA), which was successfully configured for audio equalizer and frequency classifier demonstration as exemplary applications of such memristive FPAA (memFPAA)