This paper presents a 4×4 K-band active receive phased-array antenna-in-package (AiP) with polarization control as a unit cell for the SATCOM-on-the-Move (SOTM) user terminal downlink radio system. The proposed active AiP is modular and scalable. Over-the-air (OTA) tests are executed for the evaluation of the performance. The fabricated AiP provides 34 dB of active gain at the boresight and consumes 1.16 W of DC power when all the ports are activated. The RF channel gain and noise figure of the beamformer ICs embedded in the AiP are also estimated using the OTA test measurement results.
This paper reports a manufacturable, Periodically Polarized Piezoelectric Film (P3F) Bulk Acoustic Wave (BAW) resonator using Aluminum Scandium Nitride (AlScN) materials operating in overtone mode at X and Ku band. P3F BAW technology benefits from a significantly larger film thickness than the traditional BAW thickness-frequency scaling approach, enabling a manufacturable, high quality-factor (Q), and high frequency resonator technology. A P3F material stack was realized using a combination of single and polycrystalline AlScN layers with desired polarity of layers as deposited, which enables volume manufacturing. An AlScN P3F BAW resonator was manufactured using XBAW®, a unique and patented transferred substrate process technology for next generation resonator and filter solutions. The fabricated P3F BAW resonators demonstrated 2nd overtone operation at 10.7 GHz & 18 GHz, and exhibits a FoM, (Qp × kt2) of 27 and 20, respectively. This result suggests that AlScN P3F BAW using overtone mode operation enables miniature, manufacturable, BAW RF filter technology for X band and higher frequencies.
A 300-GHz-band fundamental mixer was designed and fabricated in indium phosphide (InP) high electron mobility transistor (HEMT) technology for 6G wireless communications. To achieve a wide bandwidth, we proposed a resistive mixer with a widely split frequency matching network. The fabricated mixer IC achieved a conversion gain of -15 dB, a -3-dB RF bandwidth of 60 GHz (235-295 GHz), and a -6-dB RF bandwidth of 100 GHz (220-320 GHz), the widest ever reported. We implemented the mixer IC as a WR3.4 waveguide mixer module and used a single mixer module in the TX and in the RX in a back-to-back data transmission experiment in three different frequency bands in the range from 220 GHz to 320 GHz. Data rates of 120, 152 and 168 Gbps were achieved in the three frequency bands, with 168 Gbps being the highest data rate achieved so far by a single mixer.
We present and demonstrate a time-modulated tunable bandwidth (BW) and group-delay (GD) filter, exploring a slow-modulation operating region of N-path filters to extend the BW of conventional passive micro-acoustic filters. An array of MEMS resonators is fabricated with custom in-house ScAlN process, and heterogeneously integrated on PCB with commercial RF switches to showcase ultra-low modulation frequency, 2 to 6 % of the filter center frequency, with wide maximum BW (11.6 % with a $k_t^2 = 2.5\% $ at 430 MHz), three-fold wider than passive topologies, enabling reconfiguration while requiring no tunable passive. We show that the proposed prototype is suitable as a Self-Interference Canceler (SIC) in full-duplex scenarios, where real-time GD tunability is required. When used as an SIC, 40 dB SI cancellation within 14 % BW is achieved. Thanks to the slow-modulation approach, a 17 dBm power handling is demonstrated, along with a low −28 dBc distortion.
A polarimetric millimeter-wave radar imaging technique is proposed to remotely detect, localize, and wirelessly read a novel additively manufactured passive sensor composed of a microfluidic channel filled with liquid metal Galinstan. Very high variation of the radar-cross section of the sensor to small variations of the level of Galinstan in the channel is obtained. Indeed, at the radar-to-sensor distance of 2.4 m, the measured radar echo level of the sensor varies by 4.5 dB when the level of Galinstan changes by 1 mm. This sensitivity is higher than those previously reported in the literature for wireless and passive sensors of the same class. Moreover, the localization technique of the sensor is successfully achieved for only three false detections on 75 measurements in cluttered environments from radar-to-sensor distances up to 15 m.
This paper reports the characterization of acoustic loss at millimeter-wave (mm-wave) in high-order bulk Lamb waves using acoustic delay lines (ADL). Using periodically poled piezoelectric film (P3F) lithium niobate (LiNbO3) ADL testbeds, the propagation loss, group velocity, and propagation acoustic quality factor (Q) in the piezoelectric thin-film are extracted up to 30 GHz. This work also demonstrates the viability of employing high-order Lamb modes for enabling the frequency scaling of acoustic devices without relying on ultra-thin piezoelectric films or fine lateral feature size. An acoustic resonator is demonstrated on the same film stack to provide comparison and further validate the findings of the study.
This paper presents the optimization of coplanar waveguide integrated PCM switches. PCM switches isolation efficiency is directly affected by distance between ground planes above and below the transmission line. Reducing this distance from 160 μm to 26 μm, while keeping exactly the same PCM switch core, dramatically improves measured isolation from -22.2 dB to —31.1 dB at 40 GHz using a single device. Without changing the switch geometry, its figure of merit is enhanced from 14.9 fsec to 5.9 fsec. The design technique presented in this paper can be reused for designing CMOS integrated PCM switches.
In this paper, a wideband hybrid bandpass filter using the quarter-mode substrate-integrated waveguide (QMSIW) and parallel-coupled lines is presented and discussed. For size- and radiation-reduction, the QMSIW cavity is folded and the striplines are shielded in an enclosed cavity. First, the working mechanism including the generation and coupling of the resonance is illustrated by the lumped-element equivalent circuits. Then, the filtering polynomials specified for a 5 th -order general Chebyshev response are derived from the synthesis methodology in the bandpass domain. And the initial dimensions of the proposed filter are obtained by applying the investigated direct mapping techniques between the polynomials and the values of the lumped elements. A transmission zero (TZ) introduced by the folded QMSIW is also taken into consideration in the synthesis process. Finally, a multilayer filter prototype is designed, simulated and implemented following the synthesis procedure. The proposed hybrid filter shows the advantages in terms of wide bandwidth (61.8 % 3-dB FBW), low insertion loss (0.76 dB), high rejection level (-60 dB @ 1.5 f 0 ), low radiation and compact size (0.14 λ g × 0.14 λ g ), etc.
This paper describes the design and experimental results of a Gallium Arsenide (GaAs) 6-channel electronically reconfigurable filter bank MMIC suitable for RF filtering and frequency selective interference rejection. An intrinsically switched multiplexer (ISM) architecture is utilized to realize a 64 state reconfigurable filter bank. The MMIC includes directional integrated peak detectors to monitor signal levels entering and leaving the filter bank. Measured results for the in-band ISM state over a 4.0-8.5 GHz frequency range demonstrates 4.0 dB average insertion loss and 30dBm typical input IP3. Experimental results for the out-of-band ISM state indicates greater than 37 dB of rejection capability and 50dBm typical input IP3.
This paper presents a 28nm FD-SOI CMOS 24-31GHz broadband PA robust to 3:1 VSWR variations and exhibiting high linearity and efficiency up to deep power back-off. The circuit architecture proposes an energy efficient alternative to the Doherty PA enabling a continuous operation mode between symmetrical and asymmetrical modes. The PA exhibits 37% and 26% peak-6dB PBO PAE at 26GHz for asymmetrical/symmetrical operation, respectively. The measured results show compliance to the 5G NR and 64-QAM modulation schemes. The VSWR robustness is obtained thanks to the usage of hybrid couplers enabled in this topology. The PA core area occupies 0.90mm².
This paper presents a 2 × 2 MIMO in-band full duplex radio front-end with 55-dB self-interference cancellation (SIC) over 200-MHz bandwidth at 3.7 GHz. For 55-dB SIC, a passive 30-dB suppression is achieved by using an antenna board composed of a decoupling network and circulator with reflection coefficient controller. Additional active 25-dB cancellation is achieved by using a RFSIC board composed of four 3-tap RF cancellers between 2 transmitters and 2 receivers for the broadband operation. Each tap of the RF canceller is composed of a variable attenuator, phase shifter, group delay controller and replaceable delay filter. The RF cancellers can be adapted to not only entire 200-MHz band, but also any channel band between 3.6–3.8 GHz of the antenna board, resulting in a higher SIC. Active 30-dB cancellations and total 60-dB SIC can be achieved when the RF cancellers are adapted to lower and upper 100-MHz bandwidth.
In this paper, the 5.8 GHz band 10 W rectenna is demonstrated. The GaAs bridge rectifier IC with GaAs E-pHEMT gated anode diodes (GADs) is employed to obtain input power of 10 W. The IC is directly connected with the inductive high-impedance antenna to reduce circuits’ loss. Furthermore, the antenna is implemented on the aluminum nitride (AlN) substrate for thermal dispersion. With migrated circuit functionalities, simulated radiation efficiency of the antenna is 99.2 %. Measured rectification efficiency of the rectifier is 83.7 % at input power of 10 W. This is the top performance among 10 W class rectifies
A 2.4-GHz MEMS-based oscillator is presented with g m -boosting technique. A novel Darlington cell with a dynamic self-body-biasing scheme is proposed to boost the transconductance and to shorten the start-up time without introducing additional parasitics to the resonant tank. A 2.4-GHz MEMS resonator is used for high Q resonant tank. The proposed oscillator core is fabricated in a 180-nm CMOS technology. Measurement result shows that the oscillator achieves a phase noise of -138.23 dBc/Hz at 100 kHz offset and a figure-of-merit (FoM) of 226 dBc/Hz. The DC power consumption is 0.98-mW from a 0.7-V supply voltage. The total chip area is 0.65 × 0.57 mm 2 including the pads.
Continuous fast heart rate (HR) detection can provide heart rate variability (HRV), which indicates the autonomous activity system and has been found to change during different sleep stages. However, the accurate fast HR measurement is still challenging due to the frequency resolution limitation and high algorithm complexity of existing methods. In this paper, a novel respiration-reduced Fourier Bessel series expansion (FBSE) technique is proposed to realize fast detection of HR without filtering process using short-time (less than 5s) window length. It is theoretically illustrated that the proposed method has better spectrum resolution. The simulation results also show the proposed method has accurate spectrum representation of heart motion signal. With a custom-designed 24GHz Doppler radar, the overnight sleep experiment was carried out under the clinical standard. The results show the HRV obtained by proposed technique has the good correspondence with the polysomnography signal and has the potential on the future automated HRV-based sleep stage classification.
Source localization and reconstructions are critical in successful designs and developments of electronic circuits and systems, for they can determine undesired radiating sources and elements, especially in RF and microwave frequency ranges. The electromagnetic time-reversal (TR) method is one of the techniques for source reconstruction for its algorithmic simplicity without computations involving Green’s functions. However, the conventional TR method has limited accuracy and effectiveness when working with realistic equipment that measures field signals only with limited frequency bandwidth. To mitigate the problem, this paper proposes arbitrary-order kurtosis and applies it in the TR process. Numerical examples show that kurtosis can work with band-limited signals effectively for accurate and practical TR source localization and reconstructions.
A metallic structure is introduced into the vicinity of a mm-wave dielectric rod waveguide in order to accelerate the propagating mode and effect a phase change. When in close proximity, a maximum phase change of 770° phase change is observed at 77 GHz, and there is less than 5 dB of transmission loss over the range of 73-110 GHz. This indicates promise as a solution for phase shifter in the mm-wave and THz region. The mechanical translation range of the phase shifter is less than 1 mm, making it compatible with very small form-factor piezoelectric precision motors. In this way, we can get can avoid complicated electronic or optoelectronic tuning mechanisms that increase loss, reduce bandwidth, and raise system cost.
We report a new approach for rapid evaluation and inverse design of metallic antennas. The technique enables electromagnetic solution of candidate antenna structures in less than a second per design without making any approximations, achieving multiple orders of magnitude speedup compared to standard full-wave approaches. The method involves a completely parallelized precomputation stage, which has been GPU-accelerated, used to compute a basis set of numerical Green’s functions, which can then be used to reconstruct the field solution for any antenna in the design space by solving an inexpensive linear system. We couple this fast evaluation approach with a directed binary search algorithm and use it to inverse design new, high-gain antennas. We conclude by presenting a practical design of an ultra-wideband planar metallic antenna on ground backed dielectric substrate which achieves 50% fractional bandwidth at a 30 GHz center frequency and greater than 6.8 dB gain across the whole range.
TDM MIMO configuration widely used in high-resolution imaging radar system has several performance problems due to Doppler ambiguity. In particular, Doppler ambiguity degrades DOA estimation accuracy, making it difficult to detect an object position and utilize it. In this paper, we propose a new method to minimize the effect of Doppler ambiguity on DOA estimation rather than improving DOA estimation accuracy through accurate estimation of Doppler ambiguity. In order to suppress the phase error due to motion, Non-Coherent Integration (NCI) and Integral Phase Error Alignment (IPEA) methods are devised and experimentally verified by evaluating the DOA estimation accuracy for a moving target.
A single-antenna, frequency-tunable FDD front-end supporting simultaneous transmit (TX) and receive (RX) operation with high power handling capabilities and low TX and RX losses is presented. The system comprises a balanced CMOS N-path receiver in series with tunable evanescent-mode filters, and leverages frequency-selective reflectivity and matching for quadrature signal construction and self-interference cancellation at corresponding ports of interest. A measured 65 nm CMOS receiver prototype with manufactured cavity filters demonstrated 38 dBm blocker tolerance (B1dB) around 1 GHz at 100 MHz TX−RX spacing with no RX EVM degradation, < 0.4 dB TX insertion loss, and 3.5−4.5 dB RX NF over 0.9−1.8 GHz tunable frequency range.
