Reconfigurable Reflectarrays and Array Lenses for Dynamic Antenna Beam Control: A Review

Advances in reflectarrays and array lenses with electronic beam-forming capabilities are enabling a host of new possibilities for these high-performance, low-cost antenna architectures. This paper reviews enabling technologies and topologies of reconfigurable reflectarray and array lens designs, and surveys a range of experimental implementations and achievements that have been made in this area in recent years. The paper describes the fundamental design approaches employed in realizing reconfigurable designs, and explores advanced capabilities of these nascent architectures, such as multi-band operation, polarization manipulation, frequency agility, and amplification. Finally, the paper concludes by discussing future challenges and possibilities for these antennas.Comment: 16 pages, 12 figure

mm-Wave Silicon ICs: Challenges and Opportunities

Millimeter-waves offer promising opportunities and interesting challenges to silicon integrated circuit and system designers. These challenges go beyond standard circuit design questions and span a broader range of topics including wave propagation, antenna design, and communication channel capacity limits. It is only meaningful to evaluate the benefits and shortcoming of silicon-based mm-wave integrated circuits in this broader context. This paper reviews some of these issues and presents several solutions to them

Small Footprint Multilayered Millimeter-Wave Antennas and Feeding Networks for Multi-Dimensional Scanning and High-Density Integrated Systems

This paper overviews the state-of-the-art of substrate integrated waveguide (SIW) techniques in the design and realization of innovative low-cost, low-profile and low-loss (L3) millimeter-wave antenna elements, feeding networks and arrays for various wireless applications. Novel classes of multilayered antenna structures and systems are proposed and studied to exploit the vertical dimension of planar structures to overcome certain limita-tions in standard two-dimensional (2-D) topologies. The developed structures are based on two techniques, namely multi-layer stacked structures and E-plane corners. Differ-ent E-plane structures realised with SIW waveguide are presented, thereby demonstrating the potential of the proposed techniques as in multi-polarization antenna feeding. An array of 128 elements shows low SLL and height gain with just 200g of the total weight. Two versions of 2-D scanning multi-beam are presented, which effectively combine frequency scanning with beam forming networks. Adding the benefits of wide band performance to the multilayer structure, two bi-layer structures are investigated. Different stacked antennas and arrays are demonstrated to optimise the targeted antenna performances in the smallest footprint possible. These structures meet the requirement for developing inexpensive compact millimeter-wave antennas and antenna systems. Different structures and architectures are theoretically and experimentally studied and discussed for specific space- and ground-based appli-cations. Practical issues such as high-density integration and high-volume manufacturability are also addressed

Millimeter-wave Evolution for 5G Cellular Networks

Triggered by the explosion of mobile traffic, 5G (5th Generation) cellular network requires evolution to increase the system rate 1000 times higher than the current systems in 10 years. Motivated by this common problem, there are several studies to integrate mm-wave access into current cellular networks as multi-band heterogeneous networks to exploit the ultra-wideband aspect of the mm-wave band. The authors of this paper have proposed comprehensive architecture of cellular networks with mm-wave access, where mm-wave small cell basestations and a conventional macro basestation are connected to Centralized-RAN (C-RAN) to effectively operate the system by enabling power efficient seamless handover as well as centralized resource control including dynamic cell structuring to match the limited coverage of mm-wave access with high traffic user locations via user-plane/control-plane splitting. In this paper, to prove the effectiveness of the proposed 5G cellular networks with mm-wave access, system level simulation is conducted by introducing an expected future traffic model, a measurement based mm-wave propagation model, and a centralized cell association algorithm by exploiting the C-RAN architecture. The numerical results show the effectiveness of the proposed network to realize 1000 times higher system rate than the current network in 10 years which is not achieved by the small cells using commonly considered 3.5 GHz band. Furthermore, the paper also gives latest status of mm-wave devices and regulations to show the feasibility of using mm-wave in the 5G systems.Comment: 17 pages, 12 figures, accepted to be published in IEICE Transactions on Communications. (Mar. 2015

A Wideband 77-GHz, 17.5-dBm Fully Integrated Power Amplifier in Silicon

A 77-GHz, +17.5 dBm power amplifier (PA) with fully integrated 50-Ω input and output matching and fabricated in a 0.12-µm SiGe BiCMOS process is presented. The PA achieves a peak power gain of 17 dB and a maximum single-ended output power of 17.5 dBm with 12.8% of power-added efficiency (PAE). It has a 3-dB bandwidth of 15 GHz and draws 165 mA from a 1.8-V supply. Conductor-backed coplanar waveguide (CBCPW) is used as the transmission line structure resulting in large isolation between adjacent lines, enabling integration of the PA in an area of 0.6 mm^2. By using a separate image-rejection filter incorporated before the PA, the rejection at IF frequency of 25 GHz is improved by 35 dB, helping to keep the PA design wideband