Near-field to far-field transformations constitute a powerful antenna characterization technique for near-field measurement scenarios. In this paper, a near-field to far-field transformation technique based on multiple spherical wave expansions (SWEs) is presented. Thanks to its iterative matrix inversion nature, the approach performs the transformation of fields measured on arbitrary surfaces. Also, irregular sampling schemes can be incorporated. The proposed algorithm is based on modeling the antenna fields with not one, but several SWEs distributed over its geometry. Due to the high number of SWEs, their truncation number can be arbitrarily reduced. Working with expansions of low order allows us to incorporate the probe correction in the transformation in a very simple way, accepting any type of probe and orientation. Only the probe far-field pattern is used, thus working with its full SWE is avoided. The algorithm is validated using simulated field data as well as measurements of real antennas.

Modern radar sensors are gaining more and more relevance for several industrial measurement applications. To achieve the required range resolution and measurement accuracy, the use of higher frequencies beyond 100 GHz is beneficiary. A commonly used signal generation concept in fully integrated radar transceivers is to use a fundamental oscillator with subsequent frequency multiplication. Depending on the overall system concept, this type of signal generation suffers from a fundamental feed-through signal which generates false targets in frequency modulated continuous wave operation. Additionally, those unwanted signal components radiated by the sensors might be problematic for legal conformity or electromagnetic (EM) interference compliance. This paper presents a novel concept for frequency filtering dielectric lens antennas, to suppress unwanted signal components at harmonic frequencies based on interference filtering effects. Besides the EM simulations to theoretically prove this concept, multiple prototypes of filtering lens antennas were fabricated by conventional mechanical and additive manufacturing. Using a self-developed, ultra-compact radar sensor, measurements were taken to compare the lens antenna prototypes in terms of filtering performance and how the material characteristics affect the filtering performance. Within these measurements, the successful suppression of false targets caused by fundamental feed-through signals is demonstrated.

Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) Radar has many advantages compared with conventional Radars including improved target parameters estimation, improved angular resolution while keeping a small number of antennas. Nevertheless, these advantages can be obtained when probing simultaneously the scattering matrix with orthogonal transmit signals. Recently, a passive orthogonal waveform generation technique was introduced using a 1 × M ports Mode-Mixing microwave cavity whose transfer functions are uncorrelated. This approach makes MIMO Radar system able to satisfy transmit beamforming constraint with a cost-efficient architecture. In this paper, more conceptual clarifications are brought and the orthogonality metrics are assessed. Furthermore, the proposed method is experimentally compared with a conventional MIMO Radar based on frequency hopping waveforms.

This paper presents a comparison of chip connections using aerosol jet (AJ) and bond technology on low-cost printed circuit board (PCB) substrates. First, the behavior of the used gap filler material and the used silver ink for AJ technology on PCBs are characterized. In addition to comparing the radio frequency (RF) performance (DC to 67 GHz) of the two technologies, the mechanical stability is also compared. While the AJ technology transitions score above all for their RF performance and the lower requirements (surface finish, pad size, and adhesion) on the PCB, the bonding technology has clear advantages, especially with a different coefficient of thermal expansion values of the substrates to be connected. Finally, the measurement results of a complete package are shown, whereby the chip connection is realized once by means of AJ and once by bonding wires.

Multi-device radio frequency power amplifiers (PAs) often exhibit strongly non-linear behavior in combination with long-term memory effects, leading to an extremely challenging model development cycle. This paper presents a new, dynamic, behavioral modeling technique, based on a combination of the real-valued decomposed piecewise method and concepts from the field of machine learning. The underlying theory of the proposed modeling technique is provided, along with a detailed modeling procedure. Experimental results show that the proposed decomposed piecewise support vector regression (SVR) model leads to significant performance improvements when compared with standard SVR models for both single transistor and multi-transistor PAs. Different model thresholds are used to test the proposed model performance for both PA types. For the single-transistor PA, modeled using only one partition, an approximately 10 dB normalized mean square error (NMSE) reduction is seen when compared with the standard SVR model. For the same PA, when utilizing two partitions, the reduction improves to 14 dB. When applied to a multi-device Doherty PA, the NMSE between model and measurement data is −50 dB, representing more than 10 dB improvement compared with the standard SVR model.

Variable Z0 (VZ0) antenna technology is a new design or optimization methodology applicable to any antenna on any platform designed or optimized with any procedure. It should be particularly useful for wireless devices populating the Internet of Things. VZ0 expands the design or decision space by adding another degree of freedom invariably leading to better antennas. A simple design example illustrates its effectiveness.

A new design method for multi-access antennas is presented. This method is based on a modal analysis assuming the microstrip antennas as a resonant cavity. Using this cavity approach, the eigenmodes perturbation induced by the cavity deformation (adding slots or short circuits) is studied. As an application, a solution of multi-access antenna with two ports, with operating frequency bands centered approximately on digital cellular system (DCS) and universal mobile telecommunication system (UMTS)/Wi-Fi standards is developed. These two ports are isolated using the previous original design method. In addition to the design method, the innovation of the structure resides on its application in terms of flexibility, reconfigurability, and portability for the future development of a unique system that allows cross services where telephony joined multimedia and online services. The design method and the performances are validated through comparisons between simulations and measurements.

New technologies have resulted in transmission lines that deviate significantly from the intended rectangular cross sections. Trapezoidal cross sections and roughness that penetrate a significant depth into the surface in comparison to the skin-depth of the conductor can cause a very significant deviation in transmission line parameters from predicted values. Proximity effect further complicates the analysis by increasing losses and changing the impact of surface roughness by changing the current distribution. A skin-effect filament model that combines a traditional skin-effect filament modeling concept with traditional surface roughness modeling concepts is presented that accounts for surface roughness effects and non-ideal cross sections. The new technique models the transmission line non-idealities in a combined way with the current density in the signal and return current paths. This adapted filament model shows an average deviation of less than 2% above 1 GHz with one given transmission line measurement and does not have the computational challenges seen in a 3D full-wave solver.

An axially slotted cylinder coated with two different types of inhomogeneous coating layers is considered. These inhomogeneous coatings have decreasing permittivity profiles. The effects of various parameters of these coatings upon the gain pattern have been investigated using numerical simulations. It is studied that the gain at certain observation angles can be enhanced or diminished by controlling the inhomogeneity parameters of these considered profiles. It is further studied that for specific type of considered inhomogeneous coatings, the forward direction gain can be enhanced significantly.

This paper presents application of split ring resonators (SRR) in conventional waveguide slot array antenna to achieve performance improvement and multiband characteristics. Three SRRs have been placed on the transverse plane of a conventional slotted waveguide and has been simulated and measured. The measured results show that the antenna has dual band response with respective 10 dB return loss bandwidth 8.23–9.23 GHz (11.45%) and 9.68–11.01 GHz (12.87%). The measured gain and radiation pattern reveal that the proposed antenna has higher gain and front to back radiation ratio as compared with a conventional slotted waveguide antenna. Equivalent circuit of the proposed antenna also has been presented.

Microwave holography technique reconstructs a target image using recorded amplitudes and phases of the signals reflected from the target with Fast Fourier Transform (FFT)-based algorithms. The reconstruction algorithms have two or more steps of two- and three-dimensional Fourier transforms, which have a high computational load. In this paper, by neglecting the impact of target depth on image reconstruction, an efficient Fresnel-based algorithm is proposed, involving only one-step FFT for both single- and multi-frequency microwave imaging. Numerous tests have been performed to show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm including planar and non-planar targets, using the raw data gathered by means of a scanner operating in X-band. Finally, a low-cost and high-speed hardware architecture based on fixed-point arithmetic is introduced which reconstructs the planar targets. This pipeline architecture was tested on field programmable gate arrays operating at 200 MHz clock frequency, which illustrates more than 30 times improvement in computation time compared with a computer.

Step-impedance resonators and step-impedance capacitor coupling pads are introduced to microstrip band-pass filters to suppress spurious stop-band responses up to the ninth order, thereby providing a very wide stop band. Combined with improvements in existing suppression techniques, the overall suppression in one of the filters, with 1 GHz center frequency and 42% bandwidth, is −54 dB, up to 8.9 GHz. By also using suitably placed resistors, spurious levels are now depressed to −67 dB up to 8.8 GHz, with only 0.03 dB extra pass-band loss.

In this paper, an efficient dual function radar-communication system is proposed to improve the system's resource utilization. In this work, we considered a scenario where the location of the communication receiver is known prior but the radar target is moving and its location is changing with time. Therefore, we proposed a closed-loop design that allows an adaptive selection of appropriate information embedding strategies during tracking operations. We used two strategies that utilize the amplitudes and/or phases of the transmitted radar waveforms toward the communication direction according to the position of the communication receiver during each scan. Hence, during each radar illumination, the system carries out a target-tracking task and simultaneously maintains the communication symbols transmission toward the intended communication direction. The simulation results verify the effective performance of the proposed approach in terms of target detection and tracking performance and angular bit error rate (BER). Furthermore, the proposed amplitude phase-shift keying signaling strategy can transmit different communication symbols to different users located within the sidelobe region and also provides a significant improvement in data rate transmission and BER performance compared with the existing sidelobe-based communication strategies.

In this article, the material distributive topology-based design optimization of ultra-wide band (UWB) antenna is proposed by using improved binary particle swarm optimization (BPSO) with finite difference time domain (FDTD) method. In the improved BPSO implementation, the velocity of each particle is calculated based on complete set of bits of particle position vector. The V-shaped transfer function is employed to transform all real values of velocities to values in the interval [0,1]. The fitness function of all the particles in BPSO algorithm are computed parallely by using FDTD simulation. The usage of FDTD and the parallel computation helps in analyzing the broadband frequency characteristics of the antenna with a single simulation run. The return loss of the optimized UWB antenna obtained from FDTD, Computer Simulation Technology (CST) simulation and practical measurement are in good agreement and show good impedance matching.

In this study, a new ultra-wideband (UWB) band-edge selectivity antenna with a modified radiation slot using defected ground structure (DGS) is presented to obtain bandpass filtering reflection coefficient and gain performance. The well-designed DGS is designed on backside metallic of the substrate and can be seen as a low-pass filter that provides a good roll-off at a higher frequency. By connecting the DGS and the stepped slot and making them merge with each other, good cut-off property in the upper passband and better in-band impedance characteristics are obtained. Measured results show that the proposed design not only shows good band-edge selectivity in reflection coefficient and gain performance but also has a good impedance matching of −13.5 dB reflection coefficients and a good radiation efficiency of 90% in the operating frequencies. The measured bandwidth defined with the reflection coefficient less than −10 dB is from 3.1–11.2 GHz. Furthermore, the size of the filtering UWB antenna is 22 mm × 12 mm, which is smaller than many individual UWB antennas and UWB filters.

A new circularly polarized microstrip array antenna using the orthogonal feed technique is proposed in this paper. The antenna has a multi-layer structure and a new 3-way power divider employing the both-sided microwave integrated circuit technology is designed to configure the feed network of the array. Circular polarization (CP) is realized by creating a quadrature phase difference between orthogonal feed circuits of the patches. The multi-layer structure gives flexibility to adjust the patch spacing that helps to reduce the sidelobe level of the antenna. It is found that the multi-layer structure exhibits a gain of about 2 dB higher than that of a single layer structure by means of sidelobe reduction. The proposed structure also exhibits good CP performances that are verified by a good agreement of measured and simulated results. Simple and compact structure makes the antenna suitable for various wireless applications.

In this paper, the design and the measurements of three-dimensional through silicon vias (TSVs) based-integrated solenoids embedded within high-resistive silicon is presented. Prior to silicon implementation, a rigorous theoretical analysis is proposed to put in obviousness the advantages of using such coil architecture for L and S band applications. This analysis, demonstrates a clear reduction of the footprint passive function lying on the external substrate together with a reduced capacitive coupling with the local environment. Two-port radio frequency measurements have been performed in a wide-frequency range (100 MHz – 50 GHz) in order to support the theoretical investigations. Solenoids exhibit high-quality factors below 4 GHz – Q = 25 @ 2 GHz for a 800 pH device – and clearly outperforms classical planar architecture considered in most of the integrated circuit processes. Two different modeling approaches (compact modeling and EM modeling) are then proposed in order to speed-up their design implementation in a typical CAD design flow. Based on the available data, a good agreement is shown between and simulated data.

In the area of electromagnetic metrology, binary coded excitation signals become more and more important and various binary coded sequences are available. The measurement approach is to assess the impulse response function of a device under test by correlating the response signal with the excitation signal. In order to achieve a high measurement reproducibility as well as a high dynamic range, the generated binary coded signals have to provide low-noise. In this contribution, a low-noise signal generator realized with a field programmable gate array is presented. The performance investigation of different kinds of binary coded excitation signals and different correlation concepts have been practically investigated. With a chip rate of 5 Gchip/s, the generator can be utilized for ultra-wideband applications. In order to allow for a low-noise and long-term stable signal generation, a new clock generator concept is presented and results of phase noise measurements are shown. Furthermore, an algorithm to fast and precisely shifting the time lag between two binary coded signals for correlating excitation and response signals with a hardware correlator is presented. Finally, the realized demonstrator system is tested using two commonly used types of binary coded sequences.

This paper presents a hybrid design of 1 × 2 and 1 × 4 arrays operating in 0.277–0.292 THz on 65 nm Complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (CMOS) technology. Each of the chips has an X-band input with 3 ×3 multiplier stages and connected at the output to an on-chip ring antenna. A wideband microstrip Wilkinson four-way and two-way power dividers have been developed on a multilayer printed circuit board to feed the array elements with proper radio frequency and direct current inputs. Demonstrating improvements in effective isotropically radiated power and in total radiated power compared to a single CMOS element, the hybrid integration approach proves effective in implementing coherent THz transmitter arrays. Theoretical and practical factors that reduce the radiated power compared with ideal arrays are also discussed.

This paper proposes a novel T-shape electromagnetic bandgap (EBG) structure to suppress simultaneous switching noise (SSN) in mixed-signal systems. Noise is generated due to simultaneous switching multiple drivers in the digital ICs. It is called as SSN. It could propagate between power and ground planes of underlying PCB platform and interfere with the functionality of nearby RF/Analog ICs. So, the RF modules are isolated from the digital module for proper functioning of entire mixed-signal system. A high-impedance surface, called T-shape EBG has been implemented between digital and RF modules. It will exhibit the characteristics of bandgap for a wide frequency range to suppress the propagation of switching noise. A single unit-cell of T-EBG is periodically patterned over one side of the PCB and the other side is kept continuous. In this paper different characteristics of T-EBG have been simulated and verified with the measurement results. A 3 × 3 T-EBG layout provides an isolation of −40 dB from 0.72 to 6.39 GHz. A scaled version of T-EBG is used to shift the bandgap towards higher frequency range from 2.22 to 7.19 GHz. Also, a novel layout methodology has been proposed to broaden the bandgap from 2.02 to 18.84 GHz without reducing the thickness of dielectric substrate.