The accurate comparison (or calibration) of conventional solid-state noise sources is often thought to be a difficult process that only specialized laboratories can perform. In this paper, the uncertainties due to the impedance differences between the sources and their on and off states are emphasized and a simple formula is developed that makes them negligible. It requires an isolator being used in front of the receiver. In the experimental section, the errors associated with common practice are evidenced and compared to what can be achieved through the correction formula.

We present the results obtained on a multi-mode multi-band 20 W Monolithic Microwave Integrated Circuit (MMIC) power amplifier. The proposed two-stage circuit is based on the silicon Laterally Diffused Metal Oxide Semiconductor (LDMOS) technology. Thanks to dedicated design techniques, it can cover the Digital Cellular Service (DCS), Personal Communications Service (PCS), and UMTS bands (ranging from 1.805 to 2.17 GHz) and deliver more than 20 W of output power, 30 dB of gain and 50% of power added efficiency. When combined in a Doherty configuration with an incremental 40 W MMIC in a dual-path package, the resulted asymmetric MMIC (an industry first) can deliver an unprecedented LDMOS MMIC efficiency of up to 44% at 8 dB back-off in the UMTS band. Then, the DPA has been optimized in conjunction with a novel RF pre-distortion technique, leading to 33–80% energy saving at the system level.

This paper introduces a VDD generator for the ultrahigh frequency (UHF) passive Radio-frequency identification (RFID) tag, consisting of an RF-limiter, an NMOS rectifier, a DC-limiter, and a regulator. The proposed NMOS rectifier utilizes diode-connected native NMOS transistors with ultralow-threshold voltage instead of Schottky diodes. The theoretical equations for predicting the performance of the VDD generator are provided and verified by both simulation results in 90 nm CMOS process. The proposed VDD generator generates a 1.19-V stable output voltage with low-power dissipation and a 26.96% larger power conversion efficiency under conditions of 50 Ω antenna, 900 MHz, −23 dBm input power and 1 M DC output load. The chip area of the proposed VDD generator is only 105 × 85 μm. The simulation results indicated that the presented novel VDD generator is capable to provide efficient, stable, and input-independent power supply for Passive UHF RFID tag

This paper presents the design fabrication and measurement of a nanogap radio frequency microelectromechanical system (RF MEMS) metal-contact switch. The prosed device generates a relatively high contact force with a low actuation voltage using a dielectric layer between the actuation electrode and the moveable beam. The actuation voltage is decreased with good reliability of the device by scaling down the gap. Beam geometry optimization allowed reaching 126 micronewtons contact force with only 10 V bias voltage. The fabricated miniature switch (80 × 50 × 0.95 µm) has indeed a pull-down voltage of 6 V and a contact resistance <2 Ω with 10 V bias applied. By measuring the S-parameters, the up-state capacitance has been fitted to 22 fF. The remarkable figure-of-merit Ron × Cup = 44 fs reflects the good performance of the device. A cycling test showed the device operated for 90 min without any charging problem noted.

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.

A novel coplanar waveguide-fed Z-monopole antennas are proposed for the first time for a industrial, scientific, and medical (ISM) band (2.4–2.48 GHz) applications. To make the designed antenna suitable for implantation, it is embedded in biocompatible Al2O3 ceramic substrate. The antenna operates at resonance frequency of 2.45 GHz to support wide band communication for high data rate implantable neural monitoring application. The size of the antenna is 38.675 mm3 (8.5 mm × 7 mm × 0.65 mm). The antenna was simulated and measured by immersing it in a phantom liquid, imitate the electrical properties of the human body phantom liquid. The simulated and measured bandwidths are 10.2 and 11.4% at the centre frequency. A study of the sensitivity of the antenna performance as a function of its dielectric parameters of the environment in which it is immersed was performed. The demonstration among the design EM characteristics of the antenna is presented by current distributions.

In this paper, a rotated E-slot antenna with modified coplanar waveguide (CPW) feeding is presented to obtain broadband characteristics. The antenna comprises of a planar rectangular patch element embedded with E-slot rotated 90° anticlockwise on the radiating side. The CPW feed is modified by extending the ground plane throughout the substrate to surround the rectangular patch. This structure is capable of generating three separate resonant modes with good impedance matching. The antenna is designed on an FR4 substrate of 1.6 mm thickness, covering bands from 3.4 to 3.6 GHz for LTE and 3.4–3.694 GHz for worldwide interoperability for microwave access (WiMAX) systems. The proposed antenna provides good return loss S11 and impedance behavior.

This paper presents a designed notched band ultra-wideband (UWB) printed antenna using coplanar waveguide-fed configuration. Simple technique of perforating the substrate and modifying the ground plane and radiator patch was used to achieve UWB for the designed antenna at smaller structure. Narrow arch-shaped slot was introduced to the patch of the proposed antenna to obtain the band rejection function around the 5.4 GHz frequency to avoid the interference with WLAN applications. The proposed antenna was fabricated and the measurement result is found in well agreement with the simulation result. In addition to the acquirable UWB bandwidth, the designed antenna is capable to exhibit high radiation efficiency and omni-directional pattern.

In this paper, a novel and compact center-fed dual-band WiFi printed antenna is presented. This antenna is designed using two different arms which correspond to the oscillation points of the dual band, and uses parasitic capacitance and U-shaped microstrip line to match and control the necessary bandwidth. The measured frequency bandwidth of this antenna is 2.3–2.61 GHz (310 MHz, 12.7%) at 2 GHz, and the high-frequency bandwidth is 4.82–5.84 GHz (1020 MHz, 19.1%) at 5 GHz, which meets the requirements for applications in global WiFi communication. This PCB antenna is double-sided, long, and narrow; its size is 7 × 45.9 × 1 mm3; it can be applied to wireless access point; and it has a near-omni-directional radiation pattern. The design, analysis, and measured results of this proposed antenna will be presented.

In this paper, the design of thinned planar antenna arrays of isotropic radiators with optimum side lobe level reduction is studied. The teaching–learning-based optimization (TLBO) method, a newly proposed global evolutionary optimization method, is used to determine an optimum set of turned-ON elements of thinned planar antenna arrays that provides a radiation pattern with optimum side lobe level reduction. The TLBO represents a new algorithm for optimization problems in antenna arrays design. It is shown that the TLBO provides results that are better than (or the same as) those obtained using other evolutionary algorithms.

This paper presents a comparison between three evolutionary algorithms (EAs) for pattern synthesis of offset reflector antenna fed by a planar array of horn antennas. To perform the optimization process, an elliptical-shaped beam in the U–V plane (U = sinθ cosφ and V = sinθ sinφ) is considered as the desired far-field radiation pattern. To attain the appropriate excitation value for array elements, three conditions are considered: (1) variable amplitude (with uniform phase distribution), (2) variable phase (with uniform amplitude distribution), and (3) variable amplitude and phase excitation. Obtaining the appropriate excitation value based on the mathematical methods is always complicated and time-consuming. Therefore, genetic algorithm (GA) and particle swarm optimization (PSO) as two well-known EAs have been used widely for different applications and shown the promise to solve complicated problems. This paper compares these two EAs with invasive weed optimization (IWO) which is robust and has simple and powerful process with few tuning parameters. We found that for pattern synthesis of multi-feed reflector antenna in different conditions, IWO can provide accurate and comparable results with GA and PSO methods at approximately same iteration number. The convergence diagrams as well as the optimized radiation patterns for different conditions are presented and compared for GA, PSO and IWO.

A compact slot antenna for high-gain ultra wideband applications is presented. The slot is asymmetrically cut in the ground plane and is a combination of two rectangles. A hexagonal patch with two stepped coplanar waveguide-feed is used to excite the slot. The capacitive reactance of the hexagonal patch is neutralized by the inductive reactance created by the asymmetric slot and results into wider impedance matching. The measured impedance bandwidth of the proposed antenna is 11.85 GHz (2.9–14.75 GHz). The radiation patterns of the proposed antenna are found to be omni-directional in the H-plane and bi-directional in the E-plane. To enhance the gain of the antenna, a compact three-layer frequency selective surface (FSS) is used as a reflector. The overall thickness of the FSS is 3.5 mm. There is 4–5 dBi improvement in antenna gain after application of the FSS. The measured and simulated results are in good agreement.

In this paper, material selection has been done for dielectric substrate material in microstrip patch antenna (MPA) for three distinct classes of wireless communication applications using Ashby's approach. This material selection procedure is based on the creation and evaluation of Ashby's chart of different material indices. These material indices in turn affect the device performance indices, which decide the best possible dielectric material to be used as substrate for MPAs. In this work, quality factor, relative permittivity, and temperature coefficient of resonant frequency are chosen as material indices of MPA's dielectric substrate to get relevant performances. Ashby's selection chart shows that 0.75MgAl2O4–0.25TiO2 material for millimeter waves applications, Ca[(L1/3Nb2/3)0.85Ti0.15]O3−δ for mobile base station applications, and (Ba0.95Ca0.05)O–Sm2O3–4.5TiO2 ceramic for mobile phone miniaturization applications are the promising materials that allows best overall performance in MPAs for wireless communication.

In this paper, two compact lumped-element band pass reconstruction filters for digital microwave power amplifiers applications in the 800 MHz band are presented. The filters, based on the trisection and quartet topologies, include cross-couplings which produce transmission zeros for maximum selectivity, and can be designed with practical element values. In contrast to common filter designs the input impedance characteristic is optimized broadband to values different from 50 Ω, as required for proper amplifier operation. Both filters achieve an insertion loss of around 0.8 dB and an equiripple bandwidth of 240 MHz (trisection) and 290 MHz (quartet), respectively, with improved out-of-band suppression. Results show that a considerable improvement in amplifier linearity and efficiency can be obtained with the new proposed filters, as compared with simpler filters traditionally used in power amplifier applications.

To provide short-range super-resolution ultra-wideband (UWB) radar under multi-scattering conditions, a superior wavefront extraction algorithm is proposed in this paper. Conventional correlation-based pulse separation methods based on SAGE, CLEAN or the previously introduced superior dynamic correlation method (DCM) are revised, validated, and compared. In this paper, the DCM is improved significantly by applying the Pauli scattering matrix decomposition onto the radar data. This novel wavefront extraction algorithm is called polarimetric dynamic correlation method (PDCM) and is suitable to resolve several overlapping pulses, which consist of both strong echoes and weak echoes which are masked by the strong ones. The performance of the PDCM and the comparison with alternative algorithms is carried out by a subsequent feature extraction algorithm for visual verification. Experimental validations are performed with two complex test objects, a maximum length sequence radar device (4.5–13.5 GHz) and compact dual-polarized UWB antennas.