A new compact wideband filtering balun based on substrate-integrated suspended line technology is presented in this brief. The proposed device is composed of a λg/4 suspended stripline open-circuited stub, a λg/2 suspended stripline resonator, and a λg/2 suspended slotline resonator. These striplines and slotline are encapsulated in an electromagnetic (EM) shielding box consisting of air cavity, surrounding substrate layers, and metal layers to achieve EM shielding performance. By properly exciting the suspended stripline and slotline resonators, three transmission poles are generated to achieve high frequency selectively. The intrinsic 180∘ phase difference between the two output ports can be obtained by using the electric field distribution caused by the perpendicular coupling between the suspension stripline and the slotline resonator. The wideband passband is achieved with magnitude balance and out-of-phase properties. To validate our proposal, a wideband filtering balun operating at 2.56 GHz with fractional bandwidth of 65.6% is designed and fabricated.

Passive millimeter-wave imaging systems (PMWIS) are employed for detecting concealed objects by mapping millimeter waves emitted from materials or living tissues. The emitted waves are measured by a receiver or radiometers without employing external wave sources. In this paper, a new super-heterodyne receiver front-end of a PMWIS at 35 GHz with an even order band pass filter is simulated and implemented. The receiver has a suitable temperature resolution for the use of hidden object imaging, is integrated and lightweight assembled on one-layer board. It has a bandwidth of 1.5 GHz, a noise figure (NF) of 2.2, and a temperature resolution of 0.126 K. The even order filter is implemented based on the substrate-integrated waveguide (SIW) technology, with Chebyshev response. The filters are designed at the central frequency of 35 GHz with the bandwidth of 1.5 GHz and one of them has controllable transmission zeroes. The filters are made by printed circuit board technology, employing SIW as resonators, having a high-quality factor of 23.33. Additionally, a triple-stage radio frequency (RF) low noise amplifier has been implemented having the specification of: RF 34.25–35.75 GHz; bandwidth 1.5 GHz; gain >60 dB; NF <2.3 dB, which are better indexes compared to some other works.

In this paper, we propose a novel method for obtaining wideband spectral information of the target in microwave imaging systems by using broadband frequency reconfigurable printed transceivers. The proposed transceiver is composed of two embedded stacked microstrip antenna configurations operating in C-band (5.5–8.5 GHz) and X-band (8.5–11.5 GHz) with each having 3 GHz bandwidth. The transceiver switches between the two configurations (and thus frequency bands) using PIN diodes and collects response of the antenna in the presence of the target, in both the operating bands. This information is then combined to obtain wideband spectral information of the target from 5.5 to 11.5 GHz to achieve improved image reconstruction. The proposed reconfigurable transceiver has advantage over traditional broadband transceivers (those have slots/meandering at ground plane to achieve wideband response) that it has unidirectional radiation patterns throughout its band of operation. Hence the imaging system is implemented without the absorbers. This keeps the system compact and inconspicuous when installed for security applications. Here, a bistatic system is employed with two-dimensional target scanning performed in a real outdoor environment.

Polarization diversity technology is an effective method to improve the detection performance of passive radar systems, but the related papers mainly conduct research on the polarization diversity in interference suppression, and there are few studies focusing on the polarization characteristics of the target itself. The work in this paper is divided into two parts. The first part is going to investigate the potential benefits of signal fusion in target polarization-scattering characteristic. The analysis results show that the cross-polarized component of the target scattered echo is not always weaker than the co-polarized component, and the polarization amplitude ratio value is mostly concentrated near 1. This indicates that polarization signal fusion will likely improve target detection performance. The other part introduces a polarization signal fusion method based on the non-coherent integration (P-NCI), but this method is susceptible to the influence of the difference in the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the signal of each polarization channel, resulting in a reduction in the SNR of the fusion signal. The polarization signal fusion method based on adaptive weighting (AW-PSF) can effectively improve the robustness of signal fusion. The experimental results show that AW-PSF has better detection performance compared with single-polarization channel and P-NCI.

This article presents wideband metamaterial cross-polarizer (MCP) structure for X-band applications. The proposed MCP consists of a splitted square-shaped resonating structure with two inner and one outer stub. It has an overall dimension of 8.6 mm × 8.6 mm. A wideband polarization conversion ratio (PCR) above 0.87 magnitude is achieved with a bandwidth of 3.49 GHz ranging from 8.8 to 12.29 GHz, which works for X (8–12 GHz) band. The PCR bandwidth of full width half maxima achieved is 4.55 GHz ranging from 8.5 to 13.05 GHz. Two distinct PCR peaks are observed at 9.44 and 11.47 GHz with PCR magnitude at 99.39 and 99.00% respectively. The normalized impedance and electromagnetic parameters (real and imaginary) curves proved the presence of metamaterial properties in the region of interest. Analysis of polarization conversion phenomena at two distinct frequencies is described with the help of electric field and current distribution. The structure is replicated using ANSYS HFSS 19.1 and measured inside anechoic chamber with the help of Vector Network Analyzer (VNA). The replicated and experimented responses obtained are almost similar to one another with adaptation due to fabrication liberality.

A detailed dosimetry study of electromagnetic absorption and temperature rise under real scenarios is delivered when a mobile phone is used inside an elevator cabin. Numerically accurate human models of a 7th month pregnant woman and a 5-year-old female child are utilized as the exposed subjects. The female child acts as the phone user. The mobile phone is modeled in three talk positions (parallel, tilt, and cheek) operating at 1000 MHz and 1800 MHz. From the obtained numerical results for the specific absorption rate (SAR) and temperature rise induced by the mobile radiofrequency (RF) radiation, it is found that the child's RF exposure is significantly affected by the phone position and less affected by the relevant position of the human models. The exact opposite case applies for the pregnant woman model and its fetus. Almost all numerical investigations are carried out inside a metallic elevator cabin.

Due to increasingly complex and automated manufacturing processes, the demands on the control parameters of these processes are also increasing. One parameter is the fill quantity of, e.g., liquids in production plants, whose precise determination is of ever-growing importance. Up to now, the exact level of determination under difficult conditions, such as high ambient temperatures, has been a particular challenge. This paper demonstrates a novel method by which an M-sequence UWB radar can determine levels of low-permittivity materials in small metal containers. For this purpose, hot melt is used as an example. Thus, the influence of large temperature differences on the long-term stability of level measurement can also be investigated. The measurements show that the level of hot melt can be measured to be long-term stable with an accuracy of better than 3 mm. Furthermore, the precise determination of the empty state is highly important for many applications. For this reason, this paper shows a method for determining the empty state without complex calibration procedures. For the empty level indication, an accuracy of up to 0.5 mm could be achieved for molten hot glue and 3% of the tank volume, independent of the shape or aggregate state of the medium.

In this study, we explore a novel approach to measure blood glucose concentration in a non-invasive way using a compact defected ground structure (DGS) filter. The proposed sensor is promising because it is cost-effective, compact, non-ionizing in nature, and convenient for diabetics. Therefore, a portable microwave biosensor can be utilized using these features. In this study, we present a single DGS sensor which is designed on a Rogers RO4003C substrate and fed by a 50 Ω microstrip line, and operating in the industrial, scientific, and medical radio bands (2.4–2.5 GHz). The changes in dielectric properties in blood are mainly relying on glucose concentrations. The main concept of using a sensor is by placing a finger on the sensing area (the slot). The filter is demonstrated by simulations using CST Microwave Studio. Additionally, the blood layer with different glucose concentrations from 250 to 16 000 mg/dl is presented by the Cole–Cole model. The sensor can achieve a relatively good sensitivity of 7.8285 kHz/mg/dl. The size of the fabricated sensor is 40 × 40 × 0.883 mm3, which is suitable for hand-held use.

In this article, an innovative design of a broadband circularly polarized compact planar antenna for RFID (radio frequency identification) receivers is presented. The suggested structure used the concept of slots loaded parasitic element printed underneath a coplanar waveguide-fed radiator to achieve the circularly polarized (CP) radiation and size reduction. A parasitic element loaded with F-slot and L-slot, and a window-type slotted ground plane was used to achieve resonance at 2.45 GHz with right-handed circularly polarized radiation for RFID handheld reader application. Experimental results confirmed that the designed antenna of size 16.5 × 14.8 × 1.6 mm3 attained a −10 dB impedance bandwidth of 15.8% (from 2.330 to 2.716 GHz) and 3 dB AR bandwidth of 3.43% (from 2.410 to 2.494 GHz). An axial ratio of 0.43 dB was achieved in the boresight of the antenna at the 2.45 GHz RFID band. The concept of electric field distribution on the antenna was used to elaborate the excitation of CP radiation in the antenna.

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.

A small ultra-wideband (UWB) patch antenna for microwave breast imaging (MWI) applications is shown off in this paper. However, to improve the antenna performance relating to the bandwidth (BW), the radiating element of the suggested antenna is modified by adding slits in the patch as well as the ground plane. The proposed prototype has a relatively small size of 20 × 19 × 1.6 mm3 and it accomplishes a return loss below −10 dB (S11< −10 dB) at an overall BW of 7 GHz (4–11 GHz) with more than 3 dBi realized gain. The antenna is designed and simulated by using a finite integration technique-based simulator. In this way, the characteristics of the fabricated antenna are measured to examine the antenna performance. Indeed, the fidelity factor of face-to-face (FtF) and side-by-side (SbS) scenarios are also noticed for the same frequency range. In the final analysis, a simulation model of the antennas, that operate as a transceiver, and a breast phantom model with tumor sample is proposed for detecting cancerous tumor cells within the breast. Hence, the proposed approach is suitable for UWB based MWI applications in tumor cell detection.

Resonant frequency varies significantly due to temperature changes for microwave resonant cavities. Hence, temperature robustness enhancement is of great importance. In this paper, a resonant cavity with enhanced temperature robustness is proposed by applying the dual-material strategy to the middle cavity. Compared to the single-material cavity, the dual-material cavity can demonstrate better temperature robustness with a decrease of 72.7% in the frequency shift over the temperature range of −20 to 80°C. Moreover, the |S11| < −10 dB impedance bandwidth is 6.3% (3.39–3.61 GHz) and the gain is 20.4 dBi at 3.5 GHz for the manufactured dual-material cavity, which are much better than those of the manufactured single-material cavity. Finally, an experiment is conducted to measure the resonant frequencies with the sample solution tube of the dual-material cavity filled with nothing or 30 mg/dl CuSO4 solution, the measured values are consistent with the simulated ones. The influence of temperature drift is significantly reduced, and the feasibility of the dual-material strategy is verified.

This paper presents the prototype demonstration where an integrated transmitter circuit drives a mobile handset terminal antenna in order to provide frequency tunability and multiple input multiple output (MIMO) operation across the 0.5–4.5 GHz frequency range. The transmitter implementation incorporates on-chip weighted signal generation, i.e. amplitude and phase scaling to provide sufficient MIMO performance in the low band (700–960 MHz) and in the high band (1.5–4.5 GHz). In the transmitter, two antenna elements are used for MIMO operation in the low band and another two in the high band. The transmitter integrated circuit (IC) is fabricated in a 28 nm bulk CMOS technology with an active on-chip area of 0.2 mm$^2$. A custom antenna measurement procedure is proposed here in order to support and verify active antenna measurements with transmitter IC. A measurement procedure for the transmitter system comprising the transmitter IC and four antenna clusters is developed and discussed in comparison with traditional passive antenna measurements. The measurement results demonstrate that the transmitter IC driving the antenna clusters provides total antenna efficiency of $-6.5$ dB to $-1.5$ dB, and envelope correlation coefficient below 0.4 across the designated frequency bands. The results indicate that the implemented transmitter IC successfully tunes frequency response of the antenna clusters, and enhances the MIMO operation of such mobile antennas.

A strictly physically based design theory of a new class of Spatial Harmonic Magnetrons (SHM) is thoroughly derived which leads to analytically evaluable expressions. Thus two advantages are obtained: (1) The design parameters appear grouped into two separate categories – one just containing geometrical and material parameters, the other one exclusively containing beam current-related ones, which are in product-form determining performance. The influence of each parameter can thus easily be discovered and investigated. (2) Numerical efforts for any new design will be reduced by at least one order of magnitude. Subsequently and based on feature (1) it is derived that loading the anode structure by a suitably selected meta-material will increase output power and efficiency, will pave the way to CW operation, and can extend oscillation frequency well into the sub-THz range. Finally, it is shown that the Rising Sun Magnetron is a first step toward a meta-material loaded SHM offering the same but quantitatively reduced features and less stringent requirements to fabrication technology.

Due to the advent of high-throughput communication satellites in a geostationary orbit, the development of multiple beam phased array antenna (MBPAA) technology has become a necessity. This paper presents the design and implementation of the constituent unit of a beamforming network (BFN), which feeds an MBPAA with interleaved sub-arrays. The proposed BFN generates multiple orthogonal sub-beams with a very tiny angular distance between adjacent sub-beams in a limited field of view. The BFN consists of sub-array beamforming networks (SABFNs) with unequal number of beam ports and antenna ports, which can feed both the arrays lateral elements and the interleaved core sub-arrays for pattern shaping and side-lobe level reduction. A microwave circuit for this SABFN has been designed and fabricated in C-band. The microstrip lines have been printed on the two sides of a suspended substrate. This technique leads to size reduction of the circuit by twice a value compared to a conventional microstrip circuit. Measurements have been compared to simulations, and good conformity has been observed. The insertion loss in the path of beam ports to the antenna ports is 3.5 dB for a relative bandwidth of 10%.

In this paper, a new dual-band Wilkinson power divider (WPD) is designed and fabricated using novel low and high impedance stubs instead of quarter-wavelength transmission lines. The proposed circuit was analyzed using odd and even mode analysis, and the optimal values of design parameters were obtained using the particle swarm optimization algorithm. The designed power divider has input reflection coefficients (S11) of −22.1 and −17 dB at the first operating frequency of 2.2 GHz and the second operating frequency of 14.2 GHz, respectively. It also improves stop-band and fractional bandwidth (FBW) while maintaining a simple topology. The proposed WPD suppresses undesired harmonics from the second to the fifth with an attenuation level of less than −20 dB in the first band and generates a broad stop-band (4.4–11.5 GHz). In the first band, the FBW is 54.5%, and in the second band, it is 20.1%.

Through-wall imaging is capable of detecting various living and non-living things behind the wall. The characteristics of the wall under the investigation, amount of clutter and noise govern the quality and reliability of the image as well as the detection ability of the targets using through the wall imaging system. The characteristics of the wall are not known prior, in the literature only the intensity profile is investigated for the unknown wall characteristics using a single dielectric target and the effect of the wall characteristics on the contrast imaging and impact on time or frequency domain features are not investigated. The target with less dielectric is having less reflectivity; hence its detection in the presence of a high reflective target and a noisy environment becomes difficult. In this paper, to enhance the detection ability of the imaging system attenuation constant (α) of the wall is estimated with the proposed wall parameter estimation methods and used as a normalizing factor. To achieve effective beamforming different weighting strategies are developed and the obtained images are compared with the traditional beamforming. Furthermore, a novel approach to finding the effective rank in the low-rank estimation using a statistical model and multi-objective genetic algorithm is proposed for de-noising.

In this paper, a ring patch antenna with 1 GHz of bandwidth and three resonances is designed for the RF energy harvesting application. Two complementary split-ring resonators (CSRR) is etched out from the patch, designed at 6.8 GHz, near feed to enhance the bandwidth from 267 MHz to 1 GHz. Due to the introduction of CSRR, two additional resonances at 6.4 and 7.4 GHz are obtained with gain 5.5 and 0.2 dB respectively. The gains at 6.8 and 7.4 GHz are enhanced to 8.3 and 2 dB respectively by cascaded circular mushroom electromagnetic bandgap structures (EBGs) with circular symmetry designed around the antenna. This ring patch antenna with cascaded EBG is integrated with a rectifier circuit based on voltage doubler topology (rectenna). The results of the rectenna show that, for an input power of 7 dBm to the rectifier circuit, a DC output voltage of 1.2 V with a power conversion efficiency of 40% is achieved.

Digital radar waveforms such as orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) often have the disadvantage that they require high sampling rates if fine range resolutions have to be achieved. The frequency comb OFDM radar scheme offers a possibility to overcome this drawback and to improve the range resolution without increasing the sampling rate. Simultaneously, the high unambiguous velocity, which is one of the advantages of digital radar waveforms, is retained and due to the simple generation of orthogonal transmit signals, it is well suited for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) applications. To prove all these features of the frequency comb OFDM radar scheme, a suitable 4 × 4 MIMO demonstrator including frequency comb generation as well as up- and downconversion with these combs has been set up. Its functionality has been validated with real measurements in an anechoic chamber in conjunction with a radar target simulator to emulate very high velocities.

This work demonstrates a novel, reflective-type, dual-polarized multiband polarization transformer for various C to Ku band applications. The design constitutes a top FSS printed on a thin FR-4 grounded dielectric substrate. A y/x-polarized incident wave experiences linear-circular conversion from 4.61 to 4.71 GHz (right-hand circular polarized (RHCP)/left-hand circular polarized (LHCP)), 5.44 to 7.68 GHz (LHCP/RHCP), 10.13 to 14.98 GHz (RHCP/LHCP), and 16.68 to 17.19 GHz (LHCP/RHCP) with 3.41, 34.15, 38.63, and 3.01% FBW, respectively. In addition, it performs linear-cross conversions with a minimum 90% polarization conversion ratio (PCR) from 4.92 to 5.18 GHz, 8.32 to 9.41 GHz, and 15.56 to 16.25 GHz with 5.15, 12.30, and 4.34% FBW. Multiple surface plasmonic resonances are responsible for these polarization conversions in different bands. The device performance is angular stable for both transverse electric (TE) and transverse magnetic (TM) incidences. The design novelty lies in compacted periodicity 0.112λL, low-profile thickness 0.037λL with a multi-conversion (switching the orthogonal circular rotation in consecutive bands), and stable angular response, which can potentially be used in real-time applications.