International Journal of RF and Microwave Computer-Aided Engineering最新文献

This paper proposes a novel scheme for developing a linearly polarized (LP) hybrid antenna using a simple integration of a planner cavity-backed antenna with a conventional rectangular patch antenna. To substantiate, a half-mode rectangular substrate-integrated waveguide technique is divided into halves to reduce the size and later integrated with a patch antenna. The patch antenna is getting excited by the mutual coupling of TE₁₀₁ mode and resonating in the vicinity of the cavity resonator. These two different combinations of strategy let the antenna obtain superior characteristics such as bandwidth and gain. To make this structure enable to use in the planner circuit, a 50 Ω microstrip line is incorporated. This proposed hybrid antenna is simulated and tested experimentally to justify its worthiness. The simulated and measured data maintained good agreements regarding S₁₁, bandwidth, gain, radiation pattern, and efficiency.

In the paper, a wideband tunable 4 × 4 Nolen matrix is proposed. By using the presented topology of the Nolen matrix, tunable output port phase differences can be realized by inserting one type of tunable phase shifters (T-PS). Besides, the in-band phase deviation error is minimized by adding compensation phase shifters (C-PSs) to the output ports of the Nolen matrix. Analytical design methods based on signal flow graphs and complex exponential signal are given to obtain the rigorous relationships of the coupling and phase shifts in the Nolen matrix. Besides, a detailed method for output ports phase slope compensation is provided. For validation, a prototype centered at 5.8 GHz is designed and fabricated. Measurement results agree well with the simulated ones. By using only one voltage to control the phase shifts of the T-PS in a 90° range for each input excitation of the Nolen matrix, a full 360° range of the progressive phase difference is realized by switching four input ports. The measured fractional bandwidth under 10 dB return loss and isolation is larger than 24.5% with the in − band ± 1.5 dB amplitude imbalance and ±15° phase deviation error for ports 1-4 excitations. Besides, for a more strict criterion of ±1 dB amplitude imbalance and 10° phase deviation error, the measured bandwidths are larger than 15% for all port excitations.

We propose a new dual-band passive RFID tag antenna design by combining a rectangular spiral coil and patch-meander-line dipole with an interconnected structure. This design enables operation in high-frequency (HF) and ultra-high-frequency (UHF) RFID systems, suitable for energy harvesting and tracking applications. The simulations by the CST full-wave software demonstrate conjugate impedance matching between the tag antenna and two RFID tag chips. At 13.56 MHz (HF), the tag antenna exhibits an inductive reactance of 422.79 Ω, while at 922.5 MHz (UHF), it presents an impedance of 9.41 + j174.96 Ω. The antenna generates a maximum magnetic field intensity of 0.5 A/m and omnidirectional electromagnetic fields with an antenna realized gain of -4.26 dBi at 922.5 MHz. We also analyze the impact of the tag antenna combination using numerical software. Furthermore, we fabricate a prototype tag antenna and validate its performance with RFID readers. The proposed tag antenna achieves the maximum read ranges of 11 cm and 6.9 m for the HF (13.56 MHz) and UHF (920-925 MHz) bands, respectively, accompanied by the energy harvesting of 1.48 volts at the HF band by the coupling magnetic field received by the HF antenna to the chip ST25DV04K at the output voltage pin.

To enhance filter performance in terms of stopband, we propose a wide-stopband substrate-integrated waveguide filter based on the rejection of higher-order modes. The filter establishes the inner and outer coupling windows at the mode’s weakest electric field to achieve mode suppression. Simultaneously, we employ the electromagnetic hybrid coupling theory to analyze the electromagnetic distribution of the particular modes and determine the dimensions of the coupling circular apertures and slits based on the extracted coupling coefficients to attain suppression of the specific modes. The filter successfully suppresses all higher-order modes having resonant frequencies below that of the TE₁₅₀ mode, as demonstrated by simulation results. We conducted measurements and found that the filter has a center frequency of 4.78 GHz, a bandwidth of 100 MHz with a -3 dB attenuation, and a stopband of -25 dB that extends up to 16.62 GHz (i.e., 3.48 times the center frequency). Simulation and measurement results demonstrate a good correlation. This method, compared to other SIW filters, is easy to design, has a wider stopband range, can be readily applied to practical microwave communication systems, and has potential applications.

With the fast development of communication techniques, over-the-air testing has developed into the main testing method for current communication systems due to its advantages including no cable connection, high measurement efficiency, and independence from environment. OTA testing has become almost the only solution for 5G system testing especially after the popularity of 5G massive multiple-input-multiple-output. In this paper, we summarize the three main methods of OTA testing including the reverberation chamber-based method, the radiation two-step method, and the multiprobe anechoic chamber- (MPAC-) based method, among which we focus on the MPAC method systematically. In the MPAC method, there are two main channel synthesis techniques that have been heavily studied, namely, prefaded signal synthesis and plane wave synthesis. We summarize the current main research based on these two techniques including probe configurations, probe selection algorithms, and probe design based on the PFS technique and the design of plane wave generators based on PWS technique. The main comparisons are made for the performance of different probe selection algorithms and the performance of different plane wave generators as well as the latest advances.

This paper presents three design methods for acoustic wave (AW) filters: the direct conversion design method, the slope parameter method, and the band edge fitting method (BEFM). Since the conventional BVD model consists only of lumped elements and has accuracy only near the resonance frequency, an NM-BVD model capable of broadband modeling is proposed in this paper and used to design the filter. In the proposed BEFM, a systematically optimal filter method is used to design the AW filter, and each AW resonator is tuned to the filter prototype value to meet the desired specifications. Thus, the filter design time and the number of resonators can be efficiently improved, and the filter design time can be reduced compared with the direct conversion and slope parameter methods commonly used in filter design. To demonstrate the effectiveness of these design methods, the proposed methods were used to design and fabricate an N41 filter using scandium-doped aluminum nitride (ScAlN) resonators. The broadband capabilities of the filter were verified using BEFM. The design, fabrication, and measurement of a broadband filter that meets the requirements of the 5G N41 frequency band centered at 2.593 GHz with a bandwidth of 196 MHz have verified the filter fabricated using the proposed design method. The insertion loss is less than -3 dB in the target band and more than 30 dB out of band. In summary, the proposed BEFM provides an efficient and accurate method for designing AW filters.

This paper presents a novel procedure to design a compact and miniaturized unit cell in the substrate integrated plasmonic waveguide (SIPW) structures. The slot of the unit cell is automatically obtained in this method without needing any prior knowledge of its shape. The method is based on topology optimization through pixelization of the slot surface in the unit cell and uses a combination of binary particle swarm optimization (BPSO) and commercial electromagnetic (EM) software. With this method, first, the shapes of the two unit cells are engineered to arbitrarily reduce the high cut-off frequency. Then, two low-pass filters consisting of the proposed unit cells are designed and simulated. To further verify the proposed procedure, one of the filters is fabricated, whose measurement results are in good agreement with the simulation results. This filter provides a pass band of 5.6 to 6.3 GHz and has dimensions of 0.82λ_g × 0.22λ_g. The proposed method has the potential to minimize microwave and terahertz devices.

A Fabry-Pérot (FP) antenna with wideband dual-polarization and radar cross section- (RCS-) reconfigurability adopting water-based frequency selective surface (FSS) is presented. The feed antenna is designed to switch between horizontal polarization (HP) and vertical polarization (VP) by controlling the on/off states of two PIN diodes. By optimizing the height of the FP resonant cavity, the proposed FP antenna achieves wideband and high-gain properties. In addition, the incident wave can be absorbed when the polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA) container is filled with water, which reduces the monostatic RCS. This design can be selected to be in stealth mode or radiation mode by injecting water into or extracting water from the water container. The measured results indicate that in stealth mode, the 10-dB RCS reduction band is from 4.5 GHz to 6.4 GHz, and the peak RCS reduction is 31.5 dB at 5.2 GHz. In the radiation mode, the realized gains of the FP antenna in both HP and VP at 5.2 GHz reach 16.6 dBi. Simulated and measured results verify the realizability and operational concept of the designed FP antenna.

In this article, a novel method of fault detection in nonuniformly excited linear antenna array has been reported. This method uses an evolutionary algorithm-based technique to generate approximate radiation pattern in tune with reference faulty pattern for a nonuniformly excited linear antenna array. Based on the approximation, a binary sequence-based method of exact fault detection has been developed. In order to illustrate the effectiveness of the method, 12- and 20-element Dolph Tschebyscheff linear antenna array with amplitude fault has been considered. Superiority of the proposed method has been demonstrated through comparative study.