Reconfigurable Microstrip Bandpass Filters, Phase Shifters Using Piezoelectric Transducers, and Beam-scanning Leaky-wave Antennas

Abstract

In modern wireless communication and radar systems, filters play an important role in getting a high-quality signal while rejecting spurious and neighboring unwanted signals. The filters with reconfigurable features, such as tunable bandwidths or switchable dual bands, also play a key part both in realizing the compact size of the system and in supporting multi-communication services. The Chapters II-IV of this dissertation show the studies of the filters for microwave communication. Bandpass filters realized in ring resonators with stepped impedance stubs are introduced. The effective locations of resonant frequencies and transmission zeros are analyzed, and harmonic suppression by interdigital-coupled feed lines is discussed. To vary mid-upper and mid-lower passband bandwidths separately, the characteristic impedances of the open-circuited stubs are changed. Simultaneous change of each width of the open-circuited stub results in variable passband bandwidths. Asymmetric stepped-impedance resonators are also used to develop independently controllable dual-band (2.4 and 5.2 GHz) bandpass filters. By extending feed lines, a transmission zero is created, which results in the suppression of the second resonance of 2.4-GHz resonators. To determine the precise transmission zeros, an external quality factor at feeders is fixed while extracting coupling coefficients between the resonators. Two kinds of feed lines, such as hook-type and spiral-type, are developed, and PIN diodes are controlled to achieve four states of switchable dual-band filters. Beam-scanning features of the antennas are very important in the radar systems. Phase shifters using piezoelectric transducers and dielectric leaky-wave antennas using metal strips are studied in the Chapters V-VII of this dissertation. Meandered microstrip lines are used to reduce the size of the phase shifters working up to 10 GHz, and reflection-type phase shifters using piezoelectric transducers are developed. A dielectric film with metal strips fed by an image line with a high dielectric constant is developed to obtain wide and symmetrical beam-steering angle. In short, many techniques are presented for realizing reconfigurable filters and large beam-scan features in this dissertation. The result of this work should have many applications in various wireless communication and radar systems