In this paper, a multiple input multiple output antenna which operates at 5.8 GHz for wireless local area network applications is proposed. The proposed antenna is composed of two sets of four elements antenna array (2 × 2) on the top and a novel metamaterial structure on the ground plane. Here, the ground plane, which includes a lattice of 2 × 5 unit cells of metamaterial structure, is utilized in order to improve parameters of the antenna. Thanks to the proposed metamaterial structure, not only gain and bandwidth of antenna are enhanced, but also mutual coupling is reduced. The final design, with an overall size of 137 × 77 × 3.048 mm3, resulted in a |S11| <−10 dB bandwidth of 1.78 GHz and a peak gain of 9.2 dBi. In addition, the isolation is higher than 18 dB although the close separation from edge to edge of the two antennas is only 2 mm and radiation efficiency of 73% at the operating frequency band. All is simulated based on CST Studio software and the simulated S-parameter results of the antenna are in good agreement with measurement results.

This paper discusses the determination of key electrical parameters of AlInN/(AlN)/GaN heterostructures from capacitance–voltage (CV) measurements. These heterostructures gained recently importance since they allow for high electron mobility transistor (HEMT) devices with several remarkable records: densities of the 2D electron gas (2DEG) of 2.6 × 1013 cm−2 for lattice-matched (LM) heterostructures and barrier thickness of 14 nm, beyond 2 A/mm saturation currents, above 100 GHz operation for heterostructures grown on Si (111) with gate length of 0.1 µm. Despite these striking experimental results, a consistent determination of the most important electrical parameters, namely polarization sheet charge density, surface potential, and dielectric constant of the alloy are still missing. By setting up the correct charge balance equation, these parameters can unambiguously be determined. For instance, in the case of nearly LM Al0.85In0.15N these parameters amount to σAl0.85In0.15N/GaN ~ 3.7 × 1017 m−2, eΦS ~ 3 eV and ɛAl0.85In0.15N ~11.2, for the charge density, the surface barrier potential, and the dielectric constant, respectively.

In this paper, we show a second-order (four-resonator) absorptive bandstop filter circuit topology which gives a larger bandwidth compared to a first-order topology. Due to the absorptive characteristic, it creates a large attenuation at the center frequency using low-Q resonators. Since low-Q resonators can be used in generating a large attenuation, small-size resonators can be employed in bandstop filter design. Analytic design equations are provided so that a higher-order absorptive bandstop filter can be designed analytically. It is also shown that the second-order filter topology exhibits a better frequency selectivity having a same bandwidth. The proposed filter topology has been applied to a design of a miniaturized low-temperature co-fired ceramic bandstop filter with low-Q resonators. The Q-factor of the lumped-element resonators has been chosen to be 5 for demonstration.

In this paper, a 2.45-GHz wideband harmonic rejection rectenna for wireless power transfer is proposed. The rectenna comprises a microstrip-fed circular ring slot antenna (CRSA) and a series-parallel rectifier (SPR). A compact micro strip resonant cell is inserted into the CRSA so that the harmonic suppression over a wide bandwidth (3–8 GHz) can be obtained. The radio-frequency (RF)–DC conversion efficiency of the SPR is improved effectively by loading a proper compensating inductance, especially under the low input power levels. Furthermore, the proposed rectenna can easily achieve large-scale rectenna arrays using its simple structure. The adopted rectenna fabricated on a low cost Taconic RF-35 substrate has been measured. By up to 3rd-order harmonic rejection, the efficiency of the rectenna can achieve 70.2% with the optimum load resistance 1 kΩ. Good agreement among the calculated, simulated, and measured rectenna is observed.

We introduce an integrated design methodology for the optimization of RF-to-DC conversion efficiency of multi-band rectennas (rectifying antennas), with the aim of harvesting the RF energy available in humanized environments. Existing RF sources can either operate at known frequencies, power budgets, and locations, or can be ubiquitously available at different frequency bands, and with unknown directions of incidence and polarizations. In all cases, the RF link power budget may be extremely low. In order to harvest a significant quantity of energy, it is thus mandatory to place a very special care in the design of each part of the receiving/storing system. For this purpose, the receiving antenna must be optimized together with the rectifying circuit and the load. In our work, this is accomplished by a rigorous design tool based on the concurrent use of nonlinear/electromagnetic (EM) CAD tools and EM theory. The effectiveness of the method is demonstrated by comparing the computed and measured performance of single- and multi-band rectennas, both linearly and circularly polarized. Such antennas are designed to harvest RF energy from a variety of cellular and WiFi systems that are normally present in civil environments.

A novel multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) fractal antenna excited by a coplanar waveguide was investigated in this study. A novel technique was used to improve the isolation of 20 dB between the dual radiating elements by inserting a strip line into the outer edges of the ground plane. A sunflower structure was used to configure the antenna in three steps. At each step, an additional sunflower structure was added with half the size of that used in the previous step to enhance the impedance bandwidth. The measured values of envelop correlation coefficient and total active reflection coefficient indicated that the proposed MIMO antenna has high-diversity performance between radiating elements. Wide dual operating bands of 2–2.9 and 5–10 GHz were obtained, which can support different wireless communications, such as 3G, LTE (2.6 GHz), WLAN (2.4 GHz/5 GHz), WiMAX (2.4 GHz/5GHz), ISM (2.4 GHz/5 GHz), 5G (5–6 GHz), and satellite communications (6–8 GHz). The MIMO fractal antenna with a small size achieved a maximum efficiency of 85% and a peak value gain of 6 dBi, low-channel capacity loss of 0.15–0.4 b/s/Hz, and high isolation between radiating elements is suitable for portable communication devices.

Different types of bondwire interconnect for differential chip-to-antenna and single-ended chip-to-chip interfaces are investigated. Two differential compensation structures for various lengths of interconnects are designed and experimentally evaluated using dedicated transmit and receive radar modules operating across a 110–156 GHz band. Measurement results demonstrate that a fractional bandwidth of 7.5% and a minimum insertion loss of 0.2 dB can be achieved for differential interconnects as long as 0.8 mm. Design and measurement results of an extremely wideband low-loss single-ended chip-to-chip bondwire interconnect that features 1.5 dB bandwidth from DC to 170 GHz and insertion loss of less than 1 dB at 140 GHz are presented as well. The results show that the well-established wire-bonding techniques are still an attractive solution even beyond 100 GHz. Reproducibility and scalability of the proposed solutions are assessed as well.

A four-element wide-band octagonal ring-shaped antenna is proposed for human interface device and S-band applications. The isolation structure comprises a parasitic element and a T-shaped structure. The antenna has −10 dB impedance bandwidth 63% (2.1–4.0 GHz) with miniaturized dimension of 54.98 mm × 76 mm. The multiple input multiple output (MIMO) antenna gain is 2.83 dBi at the 2.4 GHz resonant frequency. The designed MIMO has envelop correlation coefficient of 0.026 in the 2:1 VSWR band. The −10 dB total active reflection coefficient bandwidth of 1.2 GHz has been achieved in the entire frequency band, and has MEG value of ≤−3 dB. The specific absorption rate has found below the safety limit near the human head, palm and wrist.

In this paper a new design of compact single layered triangular slotted microstrip patch antenna with spur lines and strip loading is proposed. It has been experimentally investigated that strip loading causes more size reduction where spur lines and triangular slot introduces multi frequency operation of microstrip patch antenna. The size reduction has been found to be 87% for the proposed antenna. In this article the effect of strip loading and spur lines over compactness are individually analyzed.

An ultra-wideband (UWB) frequency-selective surface (FSS) exhibiting band rejection characteristic is presented in this paper. The proposed unit cell has the size of 14 × 14 mm2 which is approximately 0.18 × 0.18 λo, where λo corresponds to free space wavelength at the lower cut-off frequency. The proposed UWB FSS consists of a single-layer substrate and provides 20 dB attenuation level for a wide bandwidth of 7.53 GHz at the normal incidence. The proposed FSS is polarization independent and also provides angular-independent operation for the EM wave incidences of 15°, 30° and 45° with 11.5 dB attenuation over a wide range from 4 to 14 GHz.

In this work, a liquid crystal based tunable composite right/left-handed transmission line for future leaky wave antennas working at the Ka-band is presented. The tuning of the liquid crystal is achieved by means of magnetic and electric biasing. For this purpose, different prototypes are fabricated for each biasing technique and their dispersive characteristics compared. Electric tunability is achieved by implementing highly resistive bias lines in the unit cell layout. Both techniques yield similar tuning capabilities at the operation frequency of 27GHz whereas the electric one has the advantage of being easily integratable in the layout.

The main implementation impairments degrading the performance of direct-conversion radio transmitters are in-phase/quadrature (I/Q) mismatch, local oscillator (LO) leakage, and power amplifier (PA) nonlinear distortion. In this article, we propose a recursive least-squares-based learning algorithm for joint digital predistortion (PD) of frequency-dependent PA and I/Q modulator impairments. The predistorter is composed of a parallel connection of two parallel Hammerstein (PH) predistorters and an LO leakage compensator, yielding a predistorter which as a whole is fully linear in the parameters. In the parameter estimation stage, proper feedback signal from the transmitter radio frequency (RF) stage back to the digital parts is deployed, combined with the indirect learning architecture and recursive least-squares training. The proposed structure is one of the first techniques to explicitly consider the joint estimation and mitigation of frequency-dependent PA and I/Q modulator impairments. Extensive simulation and measurement analysis is carried out to verify the operation and efficiency of the proposed PD technique. In general, the obtained results demonstrate linearization and I/Q modulator calibration performance clearly exceeding the performance of current state-of-the-art reference techniques.

A study of the electrical performances of AlInN/GaN High Electron Mobility Transistors (HEMTs) on SiC substrates is presented in this paper. Four different wafers with different technological and epitaxial processes were characterized. Thanks to intensive characterizations as pulsed-IV, [S]-parameters, and load-pull measurements from S to Ku bands, it is demonstrated here that AlInN/GaN HEMTs show excellent power performances and constitute a particularly interesting alternative to AlGaN/GaN HEMTs, especially for high-frequency applications beyond the X band. The measured transistors with 250 nm gate lengths from different wafers delivered in continuous wave (cw): 10.8 W/mm with 60% associated power added efficiency (PAE) at 3,5 GHz, 6.6 W/mm with 39% associated PAE at 10.24 GHz, and 4.2 W/mm with 43% associated PAE at 18 GHz.

A miniaturized substrate-integrated waveguide (SIW) power divider with embedded filter response and arbitrary power-dividing ratio loaded by open complementary split-ring resonators (OCSRRs) is presented. In the proposed power divider, the miniaturization and filtering response are realized by a pair of OCSRRs, which are etched on the metal cover of the SIW structure. The design procedure indicates that the power division ratio can be adjusted by changing the locations of the output ports. In this study, three miniaturized filtering SIW power dividers with different power division ratios (1:1, 1:4, and 1:8) are implemented to evaluate the performance of the proposed structure on the size reduction. These power dividers (1:1, 1:4, and 1:8) have the overall sizes of 0.31λg × 0.14λg, 0.25λg × 0.17λg, and 0.25λg × 0.18λg, respectively. The measured results also agree well with the simulated results.

A tunable substrate-integrated waveguide phase shifter using low-temperature co-fired ceramic (LTCC)-technology is presented in this paper. By changing the effective permittivity in the liquid crystal (LC)-filled waveguide, the differential phase can be tuned continuously. This is achieved by means of an analog signal applied to the electrodes, surrounding the LC. The design allows for precise tuning of the differential phase, which is proven with a Monte Carlo measurement resulting in phase errors of less than 3° at 28 GHz. Besides that, the ambient temperature dependency of the module is shown. The phase shifter has a high integration level and can be included into a complete and lightweight single-phased array antenna module. The phase shifter is realized with a high level of integration which is available through the multilayer process of the LTCC. It has a length of 50 and provides a differential phase shift of more than 360° at 28 GHz. The figure of merit for tunable phase shifters is >40°/dB.

In this paper, four new wideband small antennas based on the composite right/left-handed transmission line (CRLH-TL) structures are designed, tooled, and made. The proposed antennas are introduced with best in size, bandwidth, and radiation patterns. The physical size and the operational frequency of the antennas depend on size of the unit cells and the equivalent transmission line model parameters of the CRLH-TLs, including series inductance, series capacitance, shunt inductance, and shunt capacitance. To define characteristics of the antennas, the engraved J- and I-formed voids on the radiation patches are used. The physical sizes of the CRLH antennas are 0.45λ0 × 0.175λ0 × 0.02λ0, 0.428λ0 × 0.179λ0 × 0.041λ0, 0. 564λ0 × 0.175λ0 × 0.02λ0, and 0.556λ0 × 0.179λ0 × 0.041λ0 in terms of free-space wavelengths at the 7.5, 7.7, 7.5, and 7.7 GHz, respectively. These metamaterial antennas can be used for frequency bands from 7.5–16.8 GHz, 7.7–18.6 GHz, 7.25–17.8 GHz, and 7.8–19.85 GHz for VSWR < 2, which correspond to 74.4, 82.88, 84.23, and 87.16% practical bandwidths, respectively. Also, the ranges of the measured gains and radiation efficiencies of the recommended antennas are 0.1 dBi < G < 2.1 dBi and 20% < eff < 44.3%, and 0.8 dBi < G < 2.35 dBi and 23% < eff < 48.2%, for J-shaped antennas, whereas 0.1.15 dBi < G < 3.11 dBi and 30.24% < eff < 58.6%, and 1.2 dBi < G < 3.4 dBi and 32.4% < eff < 68.1% for I-shaped antennas, respectively.

In this paper, a microstrip diplexer composed of two similar resonators is designed. The proposed resonator is consisting of four microstrip cells, which are connected to a coupled lines structure. In order to select a suitable geometric structure, first, all cells are assumed as undefined structures where there is a lack of basic information about their geometry and dimensions. Then, an equivalent LC circuit of the coupled lines is introduced and analyzed to estimate the general structure of the resonator respect to a requested resonance frequency. The proposed diplexer is designed to operate at 2.36 and 4 GHz for wireless applications. The insertion losses (S21 and S31) are decreased significantly at the resonance frequencies, so that they are 0.2 and 0.4 dB at 2.36 and 4 GHz, respectively. The designed diplexer is fabricated and measured and the measurement results are in a good agreement with the simulations.

In this paper, a simple and efficient method to increase the gain and bandwidth of the wearable antennas used in several medical/communications systems is presented. To increase the gain and bandwidth simultaneously, the triple transmission lines (TTLs) method has been used. With this method, the frequency ranges of 1.7–2.5 and 5.4–5.95 GHz are covered with dual-band responses. Also, the simulated maximum gain at 2 and 5.8 GHz is equal to 8.26 and 9.86 dB, respectively. Using the TTLs method, the second frequency band (5.4–5.95 GHz) is achieved. Also, the gain improvement in operating frequencies is more than 4 dB compared to the conventional antenna. The dimensions of the proposed wearable high-gain antenna are 80 × 92 × 2 mm3 or 0.57 × 0.67 × 0.01 λg3 at 2 GHz. Finally, a dual-band sample antenna for use in medical systems was fabricated with a flexible felt substrate and its characteristics were measured. There is a good fit between the measurement and simulation results.

This work presents a fully differential wideband and low power 240 GHz multiplier-by-8 chain, manufactured in IHP's 130 nm SiGe:C BiCMOS technology with fT/fmax = 300/500 GHz. A single ended 30 GHz input signal is multiplied by 8 using Gilbert cell-based quadrupler and doubler, and then amplified with a wideband differential 3-stage cascode amplifier. To achieve wide bandwidth and optimize for power consumption, the power budget has been designed in order to operate the frequency multipliers and the output amplifier in saturation. With this architecture the presented circuit achieves a 3 dB bandwidth of 40 GHz, meaning a relative 3 dB bandwidth of 17%, and a peak saturated output power of 0 dBm. Harmonic rejections better than 25 dB were measured for the 5th, 6th, and 7th harmonics. It dissipates 255 mW from 3 V supply which results in drain efficiency of 0.4%, while occupying 1.2 mm2. With these characteristics the presented circuit suits very well as a frequency multiplier chain for driving balanced mixers in 240 GHz transceivers for radar, communication, and sensing applications.

This paper presents an original biosensor chip allowing determination of intrinsic relative permittivity of biological cells at microwave frequencies. This sensor permits non-invasive cell identification and discrimination using an RF signal to probe intracellular medium of biological samples. Indeed, these sensors use an RF planar resonator that allows detection capabilities on less than 10 cells, thanks to the microscopic size of its sensitive area. Especially, measurements between 15 and 35 GHz show the ability label-free biosensors to differentiate two human cell types using their own electromagnetic characteristics. The real part of permittivity of cells changes from 20 to 48 for the nervous system cell types studied. The proposed biodetection method is detailed and we show how the accuracy and the repeatability of measurements have been improved to reach reproducible measurements.