Francisco P. Casares-Miranda

High-gain active composite right/left-handed leaky-wave antenna

A novel high-gain active composite right/left-handed (CRLH) metamaterial leaky-wave antenna (LWA) is presented. This antenna, which is designed to operate at broadside, is constituted by passive CRLH leaky-wave sections interconnected by amplifiers, which regenerate the power progressively leaked out of the structure in the radiation process in order to increase the effective aperture of the antenna and thereby its gain. The gain is further enhanced by a matching regeneration effect induced by the quasi-unilateral nature of the amplifiers. Both the cases of quasi-uniform and binomial field distributions, corresponding to maximum directivity and minimum side-lobe level, respectively, have been described. An active LWA prototype is demonstrated in transmission mode with a gain enhancement of 8.9 dB compared to its passive counterpart. The proposed antenna can attain an arbitrarily high gain by simple increase of the length of the structure, without penalty in terms of return loss and without requiring a complicated feeding network like conventional array antennas

Wire bonded interdigital capacitor

Interdigital capacitors (IDCs) are convenient capacitance devices in microstrip circuits, even if only low capacitance values can be achieved. Nevertheless, undesired resonances degrade their performance when frequency increases. Short circuits across the end of alternate fingers of the IDC improve its high frequency response by eliminating that drawback. Simulated and measured results are presented.

Vertical microstrip transition for multilayer microwave circuits with decoupled passive and active layers

A novel broadband (including dc) microstrip-to-microstrip vertical transition for multilayer microwave circuits is proposed. This transition solves the problem of the discontinuity typically appearing in via hole transitions between two microstrip transmission lines in different layers. An analogy existing between this transition and a rectangular coaxial line is discussed. A parametric study alongside with the experimental results of the transition are presented. Reduction of local oscillator to radio frequency leakage in a mixer with this transition is demonstrated

Analytical model of the wire-bonded interdigital capacitor

The wire-bonded interdigital capacitor (WBIDC) is an interdigital capacitor with short circuits across the end of alternate fingers that result in an improved frequency response. This paper presents the analytical and circuital models of the WBIDC, which are useful to design and to incorporate into an electromagnetic or circuit analysis computer-aided design program. Design equations of the WBIDC are also presented. The analytical model and design equations have been validated with numerical analysis and experimental work.

Composite Right/Left-Handed Transmission Line With Wire Bonded Interdigital Capacitor

An enhanced composite right/left-handed (CRLH) transmission line (TL) is presented in this letter. This TL, designed in microstrip technology, is implemented by means of a new improved interdigital capacitor (IDC), the so-called wire bonded IDC (WBIDC). The use of the WBIDC broadens the frequency band where the CRLH TL can be considered as a TL. A conventional 70-Omega CRLH TL (using IDCs) has been compared, by full-wave simulation and measurements, with its enhanced counterpart (using WBIDCs). In addition, this enhanced CRLH TL has been used to design a CRLH diplexer which presents several advantages over standard CRLH coupled lines (using IDCs). The diplexer response has been verified by means of a full-wave electromagnetic solver

Exact Analysis of the Wire-Bonded Multiconductor Transmission Line

In this paper, the exact model of a multiconductor transmission line with bonding wires is presented. The model is based on the multiport admittance matrix, and is valid for any number of conductors in the structure. The model shows how to compute the two-port admittance matrix of the wire-bonded structure with direct application to the wire-bonded interdigital capacitor. The model has been validated by means of method-of-moments-based numerical simulation and by experimental work.

Active metamaterial structures and antennas

Active microwave metamaterial (MTM) structures, in particular composite right/left-handed (CRLH) transmission line (TL) MTM structures, are introduced in a general scope. Several planar implementations are described. A dual-band distributed amplifier (DA) and a high-gain leaky-wave antenna (LWA) are presented as illustrations of guided-wave and radiated-wave active MTMs, respectively

Real-time digital beam-forming active leaky-wave antenna

In this paper, a metamaterial leaky-wave antenna (LWA) with integrated active devices is discussed. A dynamic, digital, beam-forming active LWA is presented for the first time, which offers several advantages over conventional antenna arrays.

Active composite right/left-handed leaky-wave antennas

A high-gain active CRLH LWA has been presented. Different modifications in the layout of the microstrip CRLH LW structure most commonly used up to now have been proposed. A remarkable reduction in the cross-polar component, increasing the XPD in more than 28 dB, and a beam forming from fan-beam to pencil-beam radiation pattern have been demonstrated. By means of the proper amplifier choice, the proposed maximum directivity design of the 2D active CRLH LWA can also be extended to different current distributions and may therefore be used for static or dynamic beam forming