This thesis discusses the design, fabrication, integration and characterization of millimeter wave passive components using polymer-core-conductor surface micromachining technologies. Several antennas, including a W-band broadband micromachined monopole antenna on a lossy glass substrate, and a Ka-band elevated patch antenna, and a V-band micromachined horn antenna, are presented. All antennas have advantages such as a broad operation band and high efficiency. A low-loss broadband coupler and a high-Q cavity for millimeter-wave applications, using surface micromachining technologies is reported using the same technology. Several low-loss all-pole band-pass filters and transmission-zero filters are developed, respectively. Superior simulation and measurement results show that polymer-core-conductor surface micromachining is a powerful technology for the integration of high-performance cavity, coupler and filters. Integration of high performance millimeter-wave transceiver front-end is also presented for the first time. By elevating a cavity-filter-based duplexer and a horn antenna on top of the substrate and using air as the filler, the dielectric loss can be eliminated. A full-duplex transceiver front-end integrated with amplifiers are designed, fabricated, and comprehensively characterized to demonstrate advantages brought by this surface micromachining technology. It is a low loss and substrate-independent solution for millimeter-wave transceiver integration.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2007. / Title from first page of PDF file. Includes bibliographical references (p. 102-106).

This dissertation presents the design and implementation of circuits and transceivers in CMOS technology to enable many new millimeter-wave applications. A simple approach is presented for accurately modeling the millimeter-wave characteristics of transistors that are not fully captured by contemporary parasitic extraction techniques. Next, the integration of a low-power 60-GHz CMOS on-off keying (OOK) receiver in 90-nm CMOS for use in multi-gigabit per second wireless communications is demonstrated. The use of non-coherent OOK demodulation by a novel demodulator enabled a data throughput of 3.5 Gbps and resulted in the lowest power budget (31pJ/bit) for integrated 60-GHz CMOS OOK receivers at the time of publication. Also presented is the design of a high-power, high-efficiency 45-GHz VCO in 45-nm SOI CMOS. The design is a class-E power amplifier placed in a positive feedback configuration. This circuit achieves the highest reported output power (8.2 dBm) and efficiency (15.64%) to date for monolithic silicon-based millimeter-wave VCOs. Results are provided for the standalone VCO as well as after packaging in a liquid crystal polymer (LCP) substrate. In addition, a high-power high-efficiency (5.2 dBm/6.1%) injection locked oscillator is presented. Finally, the design of a 2-channel 45-GHz vector modulator in 45-nm SOI CMOS for LINC transmitters is presented. A zero-power passive IQ generation network and a low-power Gilbert cell modulator are used to enable continuous 360° vector generation. The IC is packaged with a Wilkinson power combiner on LCP and driven by external DACs to demonstrate the first ever 16-QAM generated by outphasing modulation in CMOS in the Q-band.

The enabling technologies and the issues of next-generation millimeter-wave wireless access network and 100G long-haul optical transport network were developed and identified. To develop a simple and cost-effective millimeter-wave optical-wireless system, all-round research on the technical challenges of optical millimeter-wave generation, transmission impairments compensation, and simple base station design were discussed. Several radio-over-fiber systems were designed to simultaneously deliver multi-band wireless services on a single optical infrastructure, enabling converged system control and quality maintenance in central office. For the 100G optical transport network, the issues related to successful implementations of transmitter, fiber link, and receiver of a 112-Gb/s polarization-division multiplexing-quadrature phase shift keying (PDM-QPSK) system were comprehensively explored. The experimental results based on the constructed 112-Gb/s testbed indicated that careful dispersion management can effectively increase nonlinearity tolerance. Furthermore, the special emphasis on the two impairments of the 100G network with reconfigurable optical add-drop multiplexers: passband narrowing and in-band crosstalk, was studied. The results demonstrated that these impairments can be readily predicted with proper experimental and simulation efforts.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 17-20, 1988 / Riviera Hotel, Las Vegas, Nevada / Fine cracks and irregularities on a fast moving conducting surface were detected by the use of microwave and millimeter wave radio responder techniques. The interrogation angle was restricted to an oblique incidence angle less than ±0.5 degree from the surface. The fast moving conducting surface was surrounded by both fast moving and stationary reflective conducting structures. Experimental methods and results from a fine crack 0.1 mm wide, 0.9 mm deep, and 25 mm long on a conducting surface travelling with a speed of 20.23 m/s and measured at 10.525 GH(z) and 73 GH(z) are presented. The reflection-type microwave radio responder consisted of a 10.525 GH(z) 50 mW Gunn diode cw transmitter, a circulator, and a horn antenna used as the interrogator. The receiver in the same responder consisted of the same horn antenna, the circulator and detector diode. The detector diode output was observed with a Norland 3106R digital memory oscilloscope. A reflex kylstron VA 250 was used as the transmitter signal source for the millimeter wave responder. There was a distinct difference between the responder output patterns with uncracked and cracked surfaces. It is therefore possible to use this type of responder for hair-line crack detection of fast moving conducting surfaces. It was also found that this type of radio responder can detect the surface irregularity even before the hairline crack actually occurs.

Radar system development is generally costly, complicated and time consuming. This has kept its presence mostly inside industries and research centers with the necessary equipment to produce and operate such a system. Until recent years, realization of a fully integrated radar system on a chip was not feasible, however this is no longer the case and there are several types of sensors available from different manufacturers. Radar sensors offer some advantages that are unmatched by other sensing and imaging technologies such as operation in fog, dust and over long distances. This makes them suitable for use in Navigation, Automation, Robotics, and Security systems applications. The purpose of this thesis is to demonstrate the feasibility of a simplified radar system’s user interface via integration with the most common portable computer, a Smartphone, to make it possible for users with minimal knowledge of radar systems design and operation to use it in different applications. Smartphones are very powerful portable computers equipped with a suite of sensors with the potential to be used in a wide variety of applications. It seems logical to take advantage of their computing power and portability. The combination of a radar sensor and a smartphone can act as a demonstrator in an effort to bring radar sensors one step closer to the hands of the developers and consumers. In this study the following areas are explored and proper solutions are implemented; Design of a control board with capability to drive a radar sensor, capture the signal and transfer it to a secondary device (PC or Smartphone) both wired and wirelessly e.g. Bluetooth. A firmware that is capable of driving the control board and can receive, interpret and execute messages from a PC and or a Smartphone A cross compatible master software that can run on Linux, Windows, Mac and Android OSs and is capable of communication with the firmware/control board Proper analysis methods for signal capture and process purposes Automation of some parameter adjustment for different modes of operation of the Radar System in order to make the user interface as simple as possible A user friendly user-interface and API that can run on both PC and Smartphone

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Delaware, 2007. / Principal faculty advisor: Dennis W. Prather, Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.S. in Telecommunications Systems Management)--Naval Postgraduate School, March 1990. / Thesis Advisor(s): Schwendtner, Thomas A. Second Reader: Davidson, K. L. "March 1990." Description based on title screen as viewed on August 25, 2009. DTIC Descriptor(s): Interception probabilities, communication and radio systems, communications networks, spectra, command and control systems, extremely high frequency, naval operations, tactical warfare, low rate, theses, scenarios, line of sight, military applications. Author(s) subject terms: Millimeter wave, EHF, Extremely High Frequency, LPI, Low Probability of Intercept. Includes bibliographical references (p. 68-70). Also available print.

Millimeter-wave (mmWave) communications is a promising enabling technology for high rate (Giga-bit) multimedia applications. However, because oxygen absorption peaks at 60 GHz, mmWave signal power degrades significantly over long distances. Therefore, a traffic flow transmitting over multiple short hops is preferred to improve the flow throughput. In this thesis, we first design a hop selection metric for the piconet controller (PNC) to select appropriate relay hops for a traffic flow, aiming to improve the flow throughput and balance the traffic loads across the network. We then propose a multi-hop concurrent transmission (MHCT) scheme to exploit the spatial diversity of the mmWave WPAN by allowing multiple communication links to transmit simultaneously. By deriving the probability that two links can transmit simultaneously as a function of link length, the MHCT scheme is capable of improving spatial multiplexing gain in comparison with the single hop concurrent transmission (SHCT) scheme. We theoretically demonstrate that by properly breaking a single long hop into multiple short hops, the time resource can be utilized more efficiently, thus supporting more traffic flows in the network within the same time interval. In addition, the per-flow throughput is obtained analytically. Extensive simulations are conducted to validate the analysis and demonstrate that the proposed MHCT scheme can significantly improve the average traffic flow throughput.

In recent years, the miniaturization of cell phones and computers has led to a requirement for antennas to be small and lightweight. Antennas, desired to operate in the WLAN frequency range, often possess physical sizes that are too large for integration with radio-frequency (RF) devices. When integrating antennas into three-dimensional (3D) system-on-package (SOP) transceivers, the maintenance of a compact size also provides isolation from other devices, hence, surface wave propagation or high dielectric constant materials such as low temperature cofired ceramics (LTCC) does not affect nearby components of the transceiver such as filters, baluns, and other embedded passives. Therefore, the application of design methods is necessary for realizing compact antennas in the wireless community that can be integrated to RF packages. Furthermore, it is essential that these compact antennas maintain acceptable performance characteristics, such as impedance bandwidth, low cross-polarization, and high efficiency. In addition, the analysis of circuit modeling techniques that could be used to obtain a better understanding of the physical phenomena of the antenna is quite necessary as modules become more and more complex. Based on these requirements, the focus of this research is to improve the design of compact antennas for wireless communications, wireless local area networks (WLAN), and millimeter-wave applications by using time-domain electromagnetic and circuit modeling techniques and optimizations. These compact antenna designs are applied to practical wireless communications systems such as global system of mobile communications (GSM), Bluetooth Industrial-Scientific-Medical (ISM) devices, IEEE802.11a WLAN, and Local Multipoint Distribution Systems (LMDS) applications. Parametric analyses are conducted to study critical parameters that may affect the antenna designs. Moreover, optimizations are performed to optimize the structures, and measured results are presented to validate design techniques.