Reconfigurable RF Front End Components for Multi-Radio Platform Applications

The multi-service requirements of the 3G and 4G communication systems, and their backward compatibility requirements, create challenges for the antenna and RF front-end designs with multi-band and wide-band techniques. These challenges include: multiple filters, which are lossy, bulky, and expensive, are needed in the system; device board size limitation and the associated isolation problems caused by the limited space and crowd circuits; and the insertion loss issues created by the single-pole-multi-through antenna switch. As will be shown, reconfigurable antennas can perform portions of the filter functions, which can help solve the multiple filters problem. Additionally, reconfigurable RF circuits can decrease the circuit size and output ports, which can help solve board size limitation, and isolation and antenna switch insertion loss issues. To validate the idea that reconfigurable antennas and reconfigurable RF circuits are a viable option for multi-service communication system, a reconfigurable patch antenna, a reconfigurable monopole antenna, and a reconfigurable power amplifier (PA) have been developed. All designs adapt state-of-the-art techniques. For the reconfigurable antenna designs, an experiment demonstrating its advantages, such as jamming signal resistance, has been performed. Reconfigurable antennas provide a better out-ofoperating- band noise performance than the multi-band antennas design, decreasing the need for filters in the system. A full investigation of reconfigurable antennas, including the single service reconfigurable antenna, the mixed signal service reconfigurable antenna, and the multi-band reconfigurable antenna, has been completed. The design challenges, which include switches investigation, switches integration, and service grouping techniques, have been discussed. In the reconfigurable PA portion, a reconfigurable PA structure has first been demonstrated, and includes a reconfigurable output matching network (MN) and a reconfigurable die design. To validate the proposed reconfigurable PA structure, a reconfigurable PA for a 3G cell phone system has been designed with a multi-chip module technique. The reconfigurable PA structure can significantly decrease the real-estate, cost, and complexity of the PA design. Further, by decreasing the number of output ports, the number of poles for the antenna switch will be decreased as well, leading to an insertion loss decrease

A New Frequency Reconfigurable Antenna Using Proximity Fed Technique for Wireless Applications

This electronic paper presents an innovative technologyfor efficient use of the radio spectrum. This new frequencyreconfigurable rotatable antenna is intended for wirelessapplications such as WLAN, WiMAX and Bluetooth mobileapplications. The working principle of this proposed work isto print square patches mounted on the same circular dielectricsubstrate feed by a proximity coupling to eliminate the noisesignal transmission and problems related to interference. Thethree positions correspond to an operating frequency controlledby a bipolar step-by-step engine. An optimization of the structureusing the FEM finite element method as well as a comparisonwith other structures recently realized are detailed in this paper.The final numerical simulation results are: WLAN 4.95-5.53 GHz(BW = 11%) Gain = 6.06 dBi, WiMAX 3.35-3.75 GHz (BW =11.2%) Gain = 7.48 dBi and Bluetooth 2.3-2.51 GHz (BW =8.7%) Gain = 17.78 dBi

Design Minkowski Shaped Patch Antenna with Rectangular Parasitic Patch Elements for 5.8 GHz Applications

Abstract—This paper presents the parametric study on the Minkowski shaped antenna with the rectangular parasitic patch elements. This patch antenna consists four parts – patch, feed line, ground plane and parasitic elements. The rectangular parasitic patch elements are located at the bottom of the Minkowski shaped patch. The parametric study of different patch sizes (Design 2A, Design 2B, Design 2C, Design 2D and Design 2E) is presented in this paper. The antenna parameters studied in this paper are resonant frequencies, return loss at the resonant frequency, bandwidth and realized gain. The target frequency of this antenna is 5.80 GHz for Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX) application. It shows the return loss of – 24.477 dB, bandwidth of 254 MHz (5.676 GHz to 5.930 GHz) and a gain of 2.351 dB. Index Terms—Minkowski; patch antenna; gain; return loss; bandwidt

UWB Technology

Ultra Wide Band (UWB) technology has attracted increasing interest and there is a growing demand for UWB for several applications and scenarios. The unlicensed use of the UWB spectrum has been regulated by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) since the early 2000s. The main concern in designing UWB circuits is to consider the assigned bandwidth and the low power permitted for transmission. This makes UWB circuit design a challenging mission in today's community. Various circuit designs and system implementations are published in this book to give the reader a glimpse of the state-of-the-art examples in this field. The book starts at the circuit level design of major UWB elements such as filters, antennas, and amplifiers; and ends with the complete system implementation using such modules

Antennas and Arrays for Mobile Platforms -- Direct Broadcast Satellite and Wireless Communication

Flexibility of any proposed communication links is becoming one of the most challenging features. Direct broadcasting satellite services, for example, will be greatly enhanced by providing service-on-the-move. This market is very demanding as it necessitates the development of a low cost, low profile antenna that can be mounted on top of SUVs and minivans, which is capable of continuously tracking the satellite. Another example is the wireless antennas for laptops and smart-phones, where the antennas should fit within an extremely small volume and should be capable of addressing many services over wide frequency range. In this dissertation, both DBS and the wireless antennas are addressed. In these studies, efforts have been concentrated in developing low profile planar antennas, in particular, slot arrays. Travelling wave slotted waveguide arrays have been utilized to minimize the scanning angle range limits due to their inherent beam tilt angle. CNC machines were utilized first to fabricate the early prototypes for sub-array developments. Subsequently, a low cost fabrication technology is adopted to develop a low cost and light weight full array using substrate integrated waveguides (SIWs). The SIW is fully characterized and an excellent equivalent model has been derived to allow easy translation of metallic waveguide components to SIW. Various SIW junctions, transitions, and arrays have been developed for array feed networks including a 64 radiating SIW full array and a 32 radiating SIW array with folded feed. Meanwhile, for the wireless antennas, the utilization of reconfigurable hardware has been introduced to provide the required multi-functionality services and wide frequency coverage. Various reconfigurable antennas were developed and utilized to demonstrate their advantages compared to other design options such as wide-band or multi-band approaches. Both micro-electro-mechanical switches MEMS and PIN diodes have been successfully utilized to switch between the different configurations. The placement, control, and modeling of the switches are also discussed and novel modeling and biasing topologies are introduced. A novel and practical concept of reconfigurable multiband antenna is introduced here too, where advantages of both the multi-band and the reconfigurable antenna structures can be simultaneously achieved while supporting more services

Radar Technology

In this book “Radar Technology”, the chapters are divided into four main topic areas: Topic area 1: “Radar Systems” consists of chapters which treat whole radar systems, environment and target functional chain. Topic area 2: “Radar Applications” shows various applications of radar systems, including meteorological radars, ground penetrating radars and glaciology. Topic area 3: “Radar Functional Chain and Signal Processing” describes several aspects of the radar signal processing. From parameter extraction, target detection over tracking and classification technologies. Topic area 4: “Radar Subsystems and Components” consists of design technology of radar subsystem components like antenna design or waveform design

An intelligent humidity control system for mushroom growing house by using beam-switching antennas with artificial neural networks

An automatic humidity control system for mushroom growing house based on the free-space technique is presented. The novelty of this work is the modified free-space technique by measuring the amplitude only of transmission coefficient |S21| that reflected from mushroom by using beam-switching antenna with artificial neural networks (ANNs) as a humidity sensor to control quantity and time of water misting nozzle. In the proposed system, the antenna is designed to act as the transmitting antenna at the frequency of 2.45 GHz. Its radiation patterns can be switched to 4 directions covering all corners of mushroom growing house. The measured |S21| from each direction are converted to direct current (DC) voltage by a radio frequency (RF) detector; then are trained with ANNs in the humidity range of 60-85%. The optimized ANNs structure consists of 4 input nodes, two layers of 5 hidden nodes, and 3 output nodes. To verify the proposed system, experiments were set up in controlled humidity mushroom growing house at the humidity level of 75-80% for 120 hours. The results showed that there was slightly average standard deviation (S.D.) of humidity level 1.36. Consequently, the performance of sensor system assures that it is able to apply for humidity control in large growing house

1-D broadside-radiating leaky-wave antenna based on a numerically synthesized impedance surface

A newly-developed deterministic numerical technique for the automated design of metasurface antennas is applied here for the first time to the design of a 1-D printed Leaky-Wave Antenna (LWA) for broadside radiation. The surface impedance synthesis process does not require any a priori knowledge on the impedance pattern, and starts from a mask constraint on the desired far-field and practical bounds on the unit cell impedance values. The designed reactance surface for broadside radiation exhibits a non conventional patterning; this highlights the merit of using an automated design process for a design well known to be challenging for analytical methods. The antenna is physically implemented with an array of metal strips with varying gap widths and simulation results show very good agreement with the predicted performance

A wideband beamforming antenna array for 802.11ac and 4.9 GHz in modern transportation market

In this work, a novel antenna structure has been proposed, which consists of multiple sub-array features i.e., a field selectable beam (90°, 180°, 270°, and 360°) and the choice of gain (11.16, 14.59 and 17.25 dBi) that can be easily adapted to cater for the dynamic scenarios in the transportation environment. The sub-arrays were designed using the microstrip patch antenna (MPA) concept with capacitive feed and dual substrate stacked up configuration for superior operating bandwidth covering the entire 802.11ac (5.17 to 5.85 GHz Industrial Scientific and Medical (ISM) band), in addition to the extended coverage for 4.92 to 4.98 GHz licensed band with narrow azimuth beamwidth of 24°. The sub-array was designed, simulated and experimentally evaluated and the beamforming results revealed that the antenna structure can be integrated with beamforming concepts to provide an enhanced wireless link between the ground base station and the mobile terminals that allows beam steering to focus on the targeted direction and null the interference directions with small beam width. It is expected that the proposed configurable gain/beam beamforming antenna array will further reduce the deployment cost and enhance the anti-interference performance by two-fold, and shall bring the user experience in the transportation market to the next level