Volume 71, Issue 1-2 -

In this paper we review high-speed radio-frequency integrated circuits operating up to 210 GHz and present selected state-of-the-art circuits with leading-edge performance, which we have designed at our chair. The following components are discussed employing bipolar complementary metal oxide semiconductors (BiCMOS) technologies: a 200 GHz amplifier with 17 dB gain and around 9 dB noise figure consuming only 18 mW, a 200 GHz down mixer with 5.5 dB conversion gain and 40 mW power consumption, a 190 GHz receiver with 47 dB conversion gain and 11 dB noise figure and a 60 GHz power amplifier with 24.5 dBm output power and 12.9 % power added efficiency (PAE). Moreover, we report on a single-core flash CMOS analogue-to-digital converter (ADC) with 3 bit resolution and a speed of 24 GS/s. Finally, we discuss a 60 GHz on-off keying (OOK) BiCMOS transceiver chip set. The wireless transmission of data with 5 Gb/s at 42 cm distance between transmitter and receiver was verified by experiments. The complete transceiver consumes 396 mW.

In this paper, a first study of distortion in digital power amplifiers (PA) is presented. The work is based on a voltage mode class-S PA with a GaN MMIC for the 900 MHz frequency band. The investigation focuses on the quasi-static amplitude-to-amplitude (AM-AM) and amplitude-to-phase (AM-PM) distortions. Different digital modulation schemes are applied and studied versus output power back-off. This includes two pulse-width modulation (PWM) versions as well as band-pass delta-sigma (BPDS) modulation. The results are verified by measurement data.

The conventional tapered slot Vivaldi antenna is well known for its ultra-wide band characteristics with low directivity. To improve the directivity of the conventional Vivaldi antenna, a four-slot Vivaldi antenna (FSVA) is proposed here to operate in the frequency range of 2–11 GHz. For feeding the FSVA, a binomial three-section V-shaped even mode power divider with progressing T-junctions is also designed and tested here, which is then integrated with the antenna. The proposed antenna prototype is designed and fabricated on a 1-mm thick FR-4 substrate (ɛ r =4.3, tanδ=0.025), and the return loss and radiation characteristics are investigated in the anechoic environment. The measured result shows a good agreement with the numerical simulation performed using the EM Simulator i. e. CST MWS-2015. It is found that the directivity of FSVA is approximately doubled as compared to that of the conventional Vivaldi antenna having the same dimensions. From the application point of view, the fabricated antenna is used to image various metallic objects hidden inside the sand using a vector network analyzer and associated RF components. The obtained 2D microwave images of the test media successfully show that the hidden objects can effectively be located and detected using the proposed FSVA in conjunction with a simple imaging scheme.

In this paper, a novel multilayered substrate integrated waveguide (SIW) composite right/left-handed (CRLH) structure is proposed to design beam scanning antenna for wideband broadside radiation. The unit cell of the SIW-CRLH structure is formed by spiral interdigital fingers etched on the upper ground of SIW, and a parasitic patch beneath the slot, has a continuous change of phase constant from negative to positive value within its passband. The proposed beam scanning antenna, which consists of consists of 15 identical elementary cells of the SIW-CRLH, is simulated, fabricated and measured. According to the measured results, the proposed antenna not only realizes a continuous main beam scanning from backward –78° to forward +80° within the operating frequency range from 8.25 to 12.2 GHz, but also obtains the measured broadside gain of 11.5 dB with variation of 1.0 dB over the frequency range of 8.8–9.25 GHz (4.99 %). Besides, compared with the same works in the references, this one has the most wonderful performance.

A wideband electrically small antenna (ESA) based on simplified composite right/left-handed transmission line (SCRLH-TL) is designed, fabricated and tested. The antenna consists of two different sized SCRLH-TL unit cells with different+1st-order mode resonance frequencies. The wideband property of antenna is achieved when these two+1st-order mode resonance frequency suitably merge. A dispersion analysis of the SCRLH-TL reveals that an increase in series of the dual-spiral capacitor would decrease the+1st-order mode resonance frequency, thus reducing the electrical size of the proposed antenna. The 10 dB fractional bandwidth (FBW 10 dB ) was 54.5 % and the measured maximum was 96.2 %, with an electrical size of 0.32λ 0 ×0.16λ 0 ×0.015λ 0 at 3.0 GHz (where λ 0 is the wavelength in vacuum). It is shown that the numerical results closely fit the measured results.

Novel zeroth-order resonator (ZOR) composites epsilon-zero resonance (EZR) and mu-zero resonance (MZR) characteristics was proposed. The proposed resonator was constructed by moving via from centre of the conventional mushroom structure (CMS) to the edge, then, an edge-located via mushroom structure (ELV-MS) was formed. Thus, boundary conditions were transformed from all open-ended to half short-ended and half open-ended. Then, the new ZOR composites EZR and MZR characteristics (called EZR-MZR resonator). Owing to the unique characteristic of the composite EZR and MZR, the proposed ZOR antenna radiates both horizontal-polarized field (uni-directional) and vertical-polarized field (omni-directional). Then, wide half power beam width (HPBW) radiation patterns were realized for the antenna. The deduction and analysis of the proposed EZR-MZR resonator were conducted based on the composite right/left-handed transmission line (CRLH TL) and ZOR theories, and field distributions. The proposed ZOR antenna was investigated with two cases of coupling feeding.

This paper presents a miniaturized frequency selective surface (FSS) with stop band characteristics at the resonant frequency of 5.12 GHz. The unit cell size of the proposed FSS design is in the order of 0.095 λ ×0.095 λ. The proposed unit cell is obtained by convoluting the arms of the basic swastika structure. The design provides fractional bandwidth of 9.0 % at the center frequency of 5.12 GHz in the 20 dB reference level of insertion loss. The symmetrical aspect of the design delivers identical response for both transverse electric (TE) and transverse magnetic (TM) modes thereby exhibiting polarization independent operation. The miniaturized design provides good angular independency for various incident angles. The dispersion analysis is done to substantiate the band stop operation of the convoluted swastika FSS. The proposed FSS is fabricated and its working is validated through measurements.

A novel single-layer dual-band miniaturized frequency selective surface (FSS) based on fractal structures is proposed and analyzed in this paper. A prototype with enough dimensions is fabricated and measured in anechoic chamber, and the measured results provide good agreement with the simulated. The simulations and measurements indicate that the dual-band FSS with bandstop selectivity center at 3.95 GHz and 7.10 GHz, and the whole dimension of the proposed FSS cell is only 7×7 mm 2 , amount to 0.092λ 0 ×0.092λ 0 , that λ 0 is free space wavelength at first resonant frequency. In addition, the center frequencies have scarcely any changes for different polarizations and incidences. What’s more, dual-band mechanism is analyzed clearly and it provides a new way to design novel miniaturized FSS structures.

This paper addresses the power allocation problem for cognitive radio (CR) based on hybrid-automatic-repeat-request (HARQ) with chase combining (CC) in Nakagamimslow fading channels. We assume that, instead of the perfect instantaneous channel state information (CSI), only the statistical CSI is available at the secondary user (SU) transmitter. The aim is to minimize the SU outage probability under the primary user (PU) interference outage constraint. Using the Lagrange multiplier method, an iterative and recursive algorithm is derived to obtain the optimal power allocation for each transmission round. Extensive numerical results are presented to illustrate the performance of the proposed algorithm.

Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) signals with large envelope fluctuations are prone to be affected by power amplifier (PA), resulting in degradation of system performance. Peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) and cubic metric (CM) are commonly used as the reduction criteria of envelope fluctuations of OFDM signals. However, our analysis shows that minimizing the PAPR or CM does not necessarily mean the optimization of system performance, since both metrics are inadequate to quantify the distortion in nonlinear OFDM transmission. In this paper, we fully discuss the effects of PA nonlinearity on OFDM signals and propose a new metric called distortion component metric (DCM), which is closely related to the nonlinear distortion caused by the PA. We compare the system performance when several metrics are respectively used as the reduction criterion for the selective mapping scheme. It is shown that in the presence of memoryless or memory PA, the usage of DCM can provide better inband and out-of-band performance than PAPR and CM.

Online bit error rate (BER) estimation (OBE) has been used as a stopping iterative turbo decoding criterion. However, the stopping criteria only work at high signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs), and fail to have early termination at low SNRs, which contributes to an additional iteration number and an increase in computational complexity. The failure of the stopping criteria is caused by the unsuitable BER threshold, which is obtained by estimating the expected BER performance at high SNRs, and this threshold does not indicate the correct termination according to convergence and non-convergence outputs (CNCO). Hence, in this paper, the threshold computation based on the BER of CNCO is proposed for an OBE stopping criterion (OBEsc). From the results, OBEsc is capable of terminating early in a varying SNR environment. The optimum number of iterations achieved by the OBEsc allows huge savings in decoding iteration number and decreasing the delay of turbo iterative decoding.

In this paper, a multi-band enabled femtocell base station (FCBS) and user equipment (UE) architecture is proposed in a multi-tier network that consists of small cells, including femtocells and picocells deployed over the coverage of a macrocell for splitting uplink and downlink (UL/DL) as well as control-plane and user-plane (C-/U-plane) for 5G mobile networks. Since splitting is performed at the same FCBS, we define this architecture as the same base station based split architecture (SBSA). For multiple bands, we consider co-channel (CC) microwave and different frequency (DF) 60 GHz millimeter wave (mmWave) bands for FCBSs and UEs with respect to the microwave band used by their over-laid macrocell base station. All femtocells are assumed to be deployed in a 3-dimensional multi-storage building. For CC microwave band, cross-tier CC interference of femtocells with macrocell is avoided using almost blank subframe based enhanced inter-cell interference coordination techniques. The co-existence of CC microwave and DF mmWave bands for SBSA on the same FCBS and UE is first studied to show their performance disparities in terms of system capacity and spectral efficiency in order to provide incentives for employing multiple bands at the same FCBS and UE and identify a suitable band for routing decoupled UL/DL or C-/U-plane traffic. We then present a number of disruptive architectural design alternatives of multi-band enabled SBSA for 5G mobile networks for UL/DL and C-/U-plane splitting, including a disruptive and complete splitting of UL/DL and C-/U-plane as well as a combined UL/DL and C-/U-plane splitting, by exploiting dual connectivity on CC microwave and DF mmWave bands. The outperformances of SBSA in terms of system level capacity, average spectral efficiency, energy efficiency, and control-plane overhead traffic capacity in comparison with different base stations based split architecture (DBSA) are shown. Finally, a number of technical and business perspectives as well as key research issues of SBSA are discussed.