Since last decades, microwaves have received tremendous attention as an interesting tool for material characterization. In general, standard microwave measurement methods require cutting and polishing of samples to put it in a suitable waveguide or cavity. However, several methods have been developed in order to permit a non-destructive measurement. A well-known method is based on coaxial open-ended waveguide, which is used as a sensor for dielectric characterizations. Moreover, with the requirement of new forms, developing mathematical model for each one is not convenient. Indeed, the complex structures required in the industrial field can be perfectly designed with high-performance three-dimensional software. Many attempts have been done to solve the conversion problem by proposing different algorithms. Nevertheless, they are sensitive for complex structure that contains transition part. In this paper, we propose a dielectric measurement method based on the use of coaxial waveguide. A novel algorithm for dielectric characterization of complex structures is also presented, which is based on the joint use of artificial neuronal networks and finite element method. The proposed algorithm aims to find the dielectric characterization for complex structures. Experimental evaluations applied to solid and liquid dielectrics confirm the validation of the proposed algorithm.

Fourth generation mobiles require multi-standard operating handsets with small physical size as well as increasing demand for higher data rates. Compact multi-band printed inverted-F antennas (IFA) for available wireless communications are proposed in this paper. New design of printed IFA based on uniplanar compact electromagnetic band-gap (EBG) structure concept is proposed. A printed-IFA with L-load shaped over an artificial ground plane is designed as the main antenna to cover most wireless applications such as GSM, LTE, UMTS, Bluetooth, Wimax, and WLAN. The multi-band is created by means of an EBG structure that is used as a ground plane. Different shapes of uniplanar EBG such as ring, split ring resonator, and spiral rather than mushroom-like structure are investigated. The proposed antenna is built on the uniplanar EBG ground plane with size of 35 × 45 mm2, which is suitable for most of the mobile devices.

In this letter, a passive high-selectivity dual-band filter with two controllable transmission zero (TZ) pairs is proposed, while synthesis method and control mechanism of the two TZ pairs are investigated. Specifically, by employing the magnetic/electric mixed coupling (MEMC), source–load coupling (S–L coupling) and stepped-impedance resonators, a dual-band bandpass filter with two pairs of controllable TZs is constructed. Two controllable TZ pairs can be independently adjusted by re-modifying the associated coupling structures. To validate the synthesizability and controllability of the TZ pairs, mathematical synthesis, and EM simulations are carried out. Two demonstrative filters with identical passband performance and different central TZ distributions for GSM (0.9/1.8 GHz) are designed and measured. The analysis and experimental results show that the synthesis-controllable TZ pair (fz2, fz3) introduced by MEMC can be synthesized and controlled using inline mixed coupling synthesis, and the optimization-controllable TZ pair (fz1, fz4) because of S–L coupling is controlled by S–L coupling strength optimization procedure.

A broadband linear polarized antenna is designed for radio frequency energy harvesting. The antenna covers the frequency range from 1 up to 6 GHz with relative impedance bandwidth of 126% at −6 dB reflection coefficient |S11| and extended from 1.1 to 3.3 GHz and from 4.2 to 5.6 GHz at |S11| ≤ −10 dB. A 2 × 2 dual linear polarized (DLP) antenna array is designed based on the antenna element by using equal phase and equal power divider 1-to-4 Wilkinson power divider with 180° phase shifter. The DLP antenna array covers the frequency band from 1.8 to 2.9 GHz. This frequency band covers a wide range of modern wireless communication standards, including GSM 1800, UMTS 2100, Wi-Fi 2.4, and most of LTE bands. The developed array prototype was then used to experimentally validate the simulation results. The horizontally and vertically polarized gain of the designed array were found to be quite similar across the 1.8–2.9 frequency band with an average gain value of 5.5 dBi.

This paper presents a cavity-backed dual-slot antenna in 0.13-μm SiGe BiCMOS technology. The dual-slot structure is excited by a cross-shaped strip line and a cavity which is formed by the topmost metal layer connected to the bottom metal layer through vias in between. By adopting dual-slot and cross-shaped feed line, the bandwidth is significantly enhanced by 196% compared with the single-slot antenna with straight feed line. The reason for bandwidth enhancement has been analyzed. The proposed antenna shows a measured impedance bandwidth of 15.2 GHz from 248.2 to 263.4 GHz for |S11| < −10 dB. The simulated and measured peak gains of the cavity-backed dual-slot antenna are −1.3 and −2.1 dBi, respectively. The simulated radiation efficiency is 31.1%. The total size of the antenna is 0.46 mm × 0.48 mm.

In this paper, a truncated patch antenna based on the electromagnetic band gap (EBG) structure has been proposed. The fabricated antenna has five operating frequencies at 10.4, 15.68, 19.68, 27.2, and 35.04 GHz. The fabricated prototype of the antenna constitutes a truncated rectangular patch etched with the shape of a symmetrical slot (on top) and an EBG loaded on the ground plane of the dielectric substrate. The optimized volume of the antenna is 20 × 15 × 1.57 mm3. The proposed antenna gives a good radiation pattern for the E-H field in all covered bandwidth and also achieved better performances related to the reference papers. A multiband antenna also covered the 5 G bandwidth, which resonates at 27.2 GHz from 24.2 GHz to 27.84 GHz bandwidth and at 35.04 GHz from 33.84 GHz to 36.2 GHz bandwidth, which can be used in the Internet of Medical Things. On the other hand, X/Ku/K frequency bands have been committed for wireless communication where the multiband antenna can be used to help in monitoring, especially in the case of data transmission from radio frequency sensors to health-care system in real-time applications.

This contribution gives an overview of background, design, working principles, and management issues of some scientific highlights, and of the benefits of the Network of Excellence TARGET (Top Amplifier Research Groups in a European Team).

This paper details the design and development of a planar switched beam network using 4 × 4 Butler matrix (BM) over a thin and flexible type biocompatible substrate. Four mils thick liquid crystal polymer (LCP) is used as a substrate here (ϵr = 2.92, tanδ = 0.002). The proposed design is centered at 28 GHz, targeting commercial millimeter-wave applications. Floral-shaped antenna with defective ground structures has been implemented as basic radiating elements. The whole structure is based on microstrip line configuration. The architecture occupies an area of 23.85 × 19.20 mm2 over the LCP substrate. Individual components of the BM are detailed here, followed by a system analysis of the whole integrated structure. The present work also covers the electrical equivalent circuit modeling of the whole beam-forming network. The fabricated prototype offers better than 18 dB return losses at each input port for the desired frequency band with 6 dBi (max.) peak gain and 500 MHz bandwidth around the center frequency. Port-to-port isolation of better than 15 dB is achieved with this topology. Experimental and simulated results are in good agreement in all aspects. A comparative study is also chalked out to highlight the significance of the current research work with respect to alike earlier reported structures.

This paper reports the test results of a small-scale prototype that implements a digitally beam-formed phased antenna array in the E-band. A four-channel dual-conversion receive RF module for 71–76 GHz frequency band has been developed and integrated with a linear end-fire antenna array. Wideband frequency-domain angle-of-arrival estimation and beam-forming algorithms were developed and implemented using Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) with Quadrature Phase-Shift Keying (QPSK) at 1 Gbps. Measured performance is very close to the simulated results and experimental data for an analogue-beam-formed array. This work is a stepping stone toward practical realization of larger hybrid arrays in the E-band.

In this article, the development of a high-efficiency power amplifier (PA) with the inverse class-F configuration and a novel 3/4 spiral defected ground structure (DGS) is presented. The proposed DGS structure has improved rejection characteristic and its resonance frequencies are more convenient to adjust than conventional symmetric and asymmetric spiral structure. The electromagnetic-simulated result shows that the proposed circuit has improved harmonic control performance with simplified structure and less return loss than the conventional microstrip harmonic control circuit. The 3/4 spiral harmonics control circuit (HCC) can be modeled by three parallel RLC resonators. Using the proposed structure a high-performance harmonic control circuit is designed for implementing an inverse class-F PA. For comparison, two inverse class-F PAs operating at 2.4 GHz have been implemented by the microstrip HCC and the proposed HCC, respectively. According to the experiment results, the size of the proposed inverse class-F PA is reduced by 20%, the power-added efficiency and the gain are increased by 4.8% and 1.5 dB, respectively.

The use of 130-nm CMOS for power amplifiers at 20 GHz is explored through a set of power amplifiers as well as transistor level measurements. The power amplifiers explore single versus cascode configuration, smaller versus larger transistor sizes, and the combination of two amplifiers using power splitters/combiners. A maximum output power of 63 mW at 20 GHz was achieved. Transistor-level characterization using load pull measurements on 1-mm gate width transistors yielded 148-mW/mm output power. Transistor modeling and layout for power amplifiers are also discussed. An estimate on the maximum achievable output at 20 GHz from 130-nm CMOS power amplifiers, based on findings in this paper and the literature, is finally presented.

A new type of spectrum analyzer using RF interferometry is presented. The stationary wave integrated Fourier transform spectrometer is dedicated to the measurement of transient wideband signals. The spectrometer is mobile and cheap. It consists of spatial samplers placed along a waveguide ended by a short circuit. The standing wave caused by the short circuit is sampled and the spectrum is obtained by an FFT computation. A 0.3–5 GHz analyzer was built as a proof-of-principle demonstration and an application to RF dosimetry is shown.

This paper presents an overview of the principles suitable for wireless power supply of devices with a small power input in picocells. This means predominantly different types of small electric devices in the space of rooms. Basic principles, namely electromagnetic induction and electromagnetic wave, are explained using examples of developed systems. Different types of wireless power systems are compared with respect to efficiency, frequency, power, and transmission distance.

In this paper, we propose a novel method for obtaining wideband spectral information of the target in microwave imaging systems by using broadband frequency reconfigurable printed transceivers. The proposed transceiver is composed of two embedded stacked microstrip antenna configurations operating in C-band (5.5–8.5 GHz) and X-band (8.5–11.5 GHz) with each having 3 GHz bandwidth. The transceiver switches between the two configurations (and thus frequency bands) using PIN diodes and collects response of the antenna in the presence of the target, in both the operating bands. This information is then combined to obtain wideband spectral information of the target from 5.5 to 11.5 GHz to achieve improved image reconstruction. The proposed reconfigurable transceiver has advantage over traditional broadband transceivers (those have slots/meandering at ground plane to achieve wideband response) that it has unidirectional radiation patterns throughout its band of operation. Hence the imaging system is implemented without the absorbers. This keeps the system compact and inconspicuous when installed for security applications. Here, a bistatic system is employed with two-dimensional target scanning performed in a real outdoor environment.

This article presents a compact rectangular impedance resonator (RIR)–based ultra-wideband bandpass filter with an improved reflection coefficient within the passband and controllable cut-off frequencies. The proposed filter consists of anti-parallel coupled RIR coupled with rectangular open-loop defected ground structure (ROL-DGS) etched on the ground plane. The ROL-DGS ensures better in-band and out-off-band characteristics with reduced size due to its high Q-factor. The short- and open-circuit stubs control the lower (fCL) and upper (fCU) 3-dB cut-off frequencies, respectively, by originating transmission zeros independently with the help of variations in design parameters. As a result, the filter having a compact size of 0.216λCL × 0.176λCL is achieved, where λCL is the corresponding guided wavelength at the lower cut-off frequency fCL of 2.95 GHz. Further, an equivalent circuit is also modeled to explain the working of the proposed filter, and equivalent lumped parameters were extracted. Simulated results reveal that the reported filter passes the frequencies effectively within 2.95–11.44 GHz with fractional bandwidth of 117.9%. The simulated insertion loss values within the passband are less than 1.17 dB, and the reflection coefficient is better than −19.6 dB. Further, the proposed filter is fabricated, and it was found that the measured and simulation results are in well agreement.

Frequency-modulated continuous-wave radar systems profit from increasing the absolute bandwidths of the generated frequency chirps to improve range resolution. As the relative bandwidth of SiGe-voltage-controlled oscillators (VCOs) is limited to about 80%, increasing the center frequency fundamentally or via frequency multiplication is the most direct way to increase that absolute bandwidth. However, as some applications require penetration depth, which dramatically decreases with frequency, other solutions are necessary. Therefore, state-of-the-art concepts rely on the down-conversion of generated frequency chirps via two separately stabilized frequency sources. This article implements a novel architecture, offering relative bandwidths of >100% within a single phase-locked loop (PLL). Therefore, two VCOs at different center frequencies are fed into a down-conversion mixer, whose output is directly stabilized via that PLL with one loop filter generating both tuning voltages. Those circuit blocks can be summarized as one equivalent VCO, offering a higher relative bandwidth and a significantly more linear tuning curve. Thereby, a solution to limited relative bandwidths with high VCO gain variation of single VCO synthesizers is offered while substantially reducing the hardware and implementation effort compared to the state-of-the-art.

One of the current trends in the integrated circuit (IC) development is the integration of antennas on-chip or in the package of the IC. This poses challenges in the production testing process of the packaged IC, as the antenna functionality has to be included and at least one of the signal ports cannot be accessed at a conducted manner. In order to measure the reflection coefficient of an integrated antenna, a contactless characterization method (CCM) can be used. In this paper, the practicality of a CCM is assessed, having the application of a cost-effective high-volume testing procedure for integrated antennas in mind. It is shown that the CCM yields accurate results for different imperfections in the measurement setup. Moreover, measurement results around 33 GHz using a connectorized patch antenna are shown, which experimentally verify the validity of using the CCM under near-field conditions.

Due to the advent of high-throughput communication satellites in a geostationary orbit, the development of multiple beam phased array antenna (MBPAA) technology has become a necessity. This paper presents the design and implementation of the constituent unit of a beamforming network (BFN), which feeds an MBPAA with interleaved sub-arrays. The proposed BFN generates multiple orthogonal sub-beams with a very tiny angular distance between adjacent sub-beams in a limited field of view. The BFN consists of sub-array beamforming networks (SABFNs) with unequal number of beam ports and antenna ports, which can feed both the arrays lateral elements and the interleaved core sub-arrays for pattern shaping and side-lobe level reduction. A microwave circuit for this SABFN has been designed and fabricated in C-band. The microstrip lines have been printed on the two sides of a suspended substrate. This technique leads to size reduction of the circuit by twice a value compared to a conventional microstrip circuit. Measurements have been compared to simulations, and good conformity has been observed. The insertion loss in the path of beam ports to the antenna ports is 3.5 dB for a relative bandwidth of 10%.

Ultra wideband (UWB) wireless systems are highly susceptible to interference from other services. To reduce the effect of interference from co-existing sources such as the WLAN standard IEEE 802.11a on UWB Communication, the construction of a modified template waveform using multi-carrier sinusoids is proposed in Ohno and Ikegami (2003), Ohno et al. (2004), Ohno and Ikegami (2006), and Lakshmanan and Nikookar (2007). However, the work in Ohno and Ikegami (2003), Ohno et al. (2004), Ohno and Ikegami (2006), and Lakshmanan and Nikookar (2007) considers a free space propagation channel model with no treatment of the frequency dependence of the path loss. In this paper, we broaden the study by taking into consideration a frequency-dependent path loss environment. The novelty of the work is in the investigation of the effect of frequency dependency of the path loss on the performance of interference mitigation schemes.

A gain enhanced dual-band filtenna operating at frequency bands of 3.5 and 5.3 GHz for 5G sub-6 GHz applications is presented in this article. A dual-band antenna is integrated with a filter to improve selectivity. The antenna uses printed monopoles as the radiating element, and the filtering response is achieved using a modified feedline. The designed filtenna is 50 × 38 × 1.63 mm3 in size with a maximum gain of 2.5 dBi. The novel filtenna design is equipped with an artificial magnetic conductor (AMC) for the first time to enhance the performance. A unit cell for the AMC is designed that offers zero phase shift in the desired frequencies. A four by four AMC array is designed using this unit cell, which is used as a reflective surface to improve the radiation characteristics of the filtenna. The gain of the filtenna is improved three times up to 7.5 dBi in both bands. The proposed design's overall planar dimensions are 80 × 80 mm2. Using AMC, the gain has improved with a very minute or no change in the other characteristics. The measured results are congruent with the simulated ones, illustrating that the filtenna has good impedance matching and excellent gain in both bands.