In this paper, we present a novel flexible moon-shaped slot implantable antenna for neural recording systems and head implants. It covers both medical Industrial, Scientific and Medical band (2.45 GHz) and impulse ratio ultra-wideband (IR-UWB) frequency range (3.1–10.6 GHz) for forward and backward telemetry applications. It has a simple and miniaturized structure in comparison with the antennas reported in the other researches. Furthermore, for adapting with natural curvature of human head, a flexible substrate is chosen with a good antenna performance under the bending. The proposed antenna is analyzed in a multi-layer box model of head tissues to speed up the antenna design procedures. On the basis of the simulation results, we achieved the good impedance matching over the desired frequency range (S11 below −10 dB). Far-field characteristics are considered, as well. The directivity is in suitable range for UWB short-range communications and its mean value is 3.84 dBi. Finally, to take into account patents’ safety regulations and the effective isotropic radiated power restriction in the desired frequency range, the maximum power of transmitter has been calculated. A phantom containing a mixture of sugar and water is used to test the fabricated antenna. The measured parameters are well matched to the full-wave simulation results.

This paper deals with the concept of microliter sensing of human blood samples by waveguide dielectrometry at microwave frequency (39.5 GHz). The methods, research protocol, and basic results derived from the permittivity measurements are presented. Here we summarize the results of our 5-year research on developing a multidisciplinary approach to the characterization of erythrocytes dielectric response, in parallel with biochemical studies of their receptor-membrane activity, within the scope of a case–control study for in vitro diagnostics of acute and chronic neurological conditions.

A novel transmission line structure has been developed to facilitate the delivery of both adrenaline and microwave energy to achieve hemostasis. A proximal end impedance transformer and radiative tip have been designed and manufactured to provide good match between the novel hollow transmission line and the microwave source and tissue, respectively. Further consideration of the challenges and problems encountered along with evidence of successful microwave energy delivery at 5.8 GHz into porcine liver model providing a controlled and focused coagulation zone of approximately 5 mm.

Continuous-wave (CW) radars have been recently investigated in healthcare aiming at contactless health monitoring. However, a major problem in monostatic CW architectures is represented by the unwanted leakage produced by poor isolation between transmitter and receiver, which can drastically decrease the receiver's sensitivity reducing therefore the radar dynamic range. Although this situation can be easily controlled in case of narrowband CW radar by an appropriate passive microwave design, it becomes much more complicated in case of stepped-frequency CW and frequency-modulated CW architectures that present an ultra-wideband nature. In this paper, a monostatic CW radar integrating a tunable wideband leakage canceler aiming at indoor tagless localization is presented and discussed. The use of the feedforward canceler allows a strong reduction of the unwanted leakage over the whole radar bandwidth. Experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of this approach, showing an outstanding improvement of the radar dynamic range.

This paper reports on a microwave heater at 20 GHz for digital microfluidics. It allows rapid heating of nanoliter fluid samples and simultaneous temperature monitoring by correlating the reflection coefficient of the heater with the temperature dependency of the relative permittivity of the lossy fluid under consideration, in this case demineralized water. Microwave heating was performed with power levels of 20 and 23 dBm at the on-wafer probe tips on samples of 500 nL. Temperature measurements were carried out with a miniaturized type K thermocouple, and a platinum resistor to monitor the reference temperature. Microwave and thermal performances have been characterized using multi-physics software, and measurements obtained with a large signal vector network analyzer showed good agreement with simulated data. An average heating rate of 20 °C/s was observed during the first 4 s of the heating process.

This paper presents a new artificial neural network (ANN)-based radar data processing approach for the detection of breast cancers located inside fibro-glandular tissues. The aim is not the breast imaging but detecting tumors through ANN processing of data extracted from the radar signals measured around the breast. The proposed approach has been assessed using several realistic two-dimensional breast geometries derived from the models provided by the numerical breast phantom repository of the University of Wisconsin Cross-Disciplinary Electromagnetic Laboratory (UWCEM). The pulsed radar system was assumed to operate in the mono-static configuration. The obtained results showed the abilities of the proposed approach to detect, for any single radar trace, tumors located inside the fibro-glandular tissues with a sensitivity of 93%, a specificity of 90%, and an overall accuracy of 92%.

This paper outlines a new class of quad-band amplifier (QBA) realized using extended composite right- and left-handed coupled lines. The design procedure to reach the QB CLs with predefined frequency operations and characteristic impedance of their ports is clearly presented. Designed and fabricated QBA operation frequencies are $f_{b_{1}} = 2.9\,GHz$ and ${\rm \;} f_{b_2} = 4.3\,GHz$ (output port B) ${\bi \;} \; f_{f_1} = 3.8\,GHz\; $ and $\; \; f_{f_2} = 5\,GHz\; $ (output port C) and the proposed structure exhibits a matching (−10 dB) bandwidth of over 300 MHz in each operation frequency bands. In addition, the insertion loss is smaller than 1 dB. The length and the width of the proposed QBA are approximately 7.7 and 2.4 cm, respectively. To further demonstrate the idea, a QBA is successfully designed and fabricated. The simulated and measured results of the proposed QBA are presented to verify the proposed idea.

With the increasing demand of millimeter-wave (MMW) communication, the performance of its frequency synthesizer has high requirements. In this paper, a multiple conversion mechanism, which used hybrid frequency synthesis technique is presented. Some key modules include linear frequency-modulated generator, agile, and low phase noise local oscillators (LOs), automatic gain control, receiver front-end circuit, and MMW LO circuits are discussed and simulated to verify correctness of the mechanism. The experimental results show that, spurious is better than −65 dBc, phase noise is no more than −80 dBc/Hz@1 kHz, and the maximum frequency-hopping time is <1.8 µs.

The paper presents a two-dimensional (2D) extended envelope memory polynomial model for concurrent dual-band radio frequency (RF) power amplifiers (PAs). The model is derived based on the physical knowledge of a dual-band RF PA. The derived model contains cross-modulation terms not included in previously published models; these terms are found to be of importance for both behavioral modeling and digital predistortion (DPD). The performance of the derived model is evaluated both as the behavioral model and DPD, and the performance is compared with state-of-the-art 2D-DPD and dual-band generalized memory polynomial (DB-GMP) models. Experimental result shows that the proposed model resulted in normalized mean square error of −51.7/−51.6 dB and adjacent channel error power ratio of −63.1/−63.4 dB, for channel 1/2, whereas the 2D-DPD resulted in the largest model error and DB-GMP resulted in model parameters that are three times more than those resulted with the proposed model with the same performance. As pre-distorter, the proposed model resulted in adjacent channel power ratio of −55.8/−54.6 dB for channel 1/2 and is 7–10 dB lower than those resulted with the 2D-DPD model and 2–4 dB lower compared with the DB-GMP model.

A novel design of planar dual-band microstrip crossover operating at small and large frequency ratios is presented. These features of the proposed dual-band crossover are achieved by a cross-shaped transmission line. To obtain the dual-band characteristics, the required closed form design formulas are computed using the ABCD matrix method. Based on the design formulas, the realizable small and large band ratios are calculated as 1.65–2.14 and 4.1–8.76, respectively. To validate the computed band ratios, three examples of dual-band crossovers are presented. Finally, two prototypes of dual-band crossover working at smaller and larger frequency ratios are fabricated and tested. The fabricated dual-band crossovers exhibit good return loss and isolation of over 20 dB with minimal insertion loss.

A miniaturized tri-passband power divider integrating a power divider with two tri-band bandpass filters is presented. The short- and open-stub-loaded resonators are used in this presented power divider to implement the bandpass-filtering response. Then, the presented power divider has not only the power-dividing/combining function, but also the tri-passband filtering response. When the central frequency of the second passband is fixed, the other two passband central frequencies of the tri-band power divider can be flexibly controlled by changing the lengths of the stubs. The even- and odd-mode equivalent circuits of the proposed tri-band power divider are analyzed, and the design equations are derived, which can be used to guide the design of the presented miniaturized tri-passband power divider. The measured results agree well with the simulated ones.

A new study of right-handed and composite right/left-handed metamaterial transmission lines (TL) using their equivalent circuits and a new approach of the wave concept iterative process method is presented. This approach has the advantage of simulating all the periodic structures by only simulating one basic cell thanks to the surrounding periodic walls. A suitable choice of the cell length is necessary to work with the current as well as voltage and to approach the real behavior of the TL. The simulation results of these circuits, such as the calculation of current, voltage and the parameters S, helped to validate all the theoretical study.

In this paper, a wideband bandpass filter using multi-mode resonator and mixed electromagnetic (EM) coupling is presented. To increase the bandwidth while not enlarge the circuit size, multi-short-stub multi-mode resonator, which produces multiple resonances, is utilized. Furthermore, the capacitive gap between open ends of the stubs is utilized to realize electric coupling between the multi-mode resonator and quarter-wavelength stepped impedance resonator. Meanwhile, a high-impedance transmission line between them is used to implement magnetic coupling. This mixed EM coupling can produce transmission zero near the passband, consequently improving the frequency selectivity of proposed filter. Measured results of the filter prototype are in good agreement with the simulated ones. The filter is with an insertion loss at central frequency of 15.86 GHz about 2.5 dB, a 3 dB bandwidth about 5.72 GHz (the fractional bandwidth about 36%), and the variation of group delay over the whole passband <0.28 ns. Additionally, the effective circuit size of the filter is about 0.126 λg2, where λg is the wavelength of 15.86 GHz. All these results have shown that proposed filter is promising for future high-precision imaging system or high-speed communication application.

This paper presents a new optically controlled reconfigurable ultra-wideband antenna using reconfigurable optical router with photonic crystal substrate. The proposed antenna has three optical switches. The optical switches are made by placing silicon wafers over three slots etched on the resonator. The coplanar fed microstrip antenna can work at eight modes using optically controlled switches. This design proposes triple narrow notched bands at center frequencies 3.5 GHz “WiMAX”, 5.5 GHz “WLAN” and 8.4 GHz “X-band satellite communication”. The proposed antenna satisfies the voltage standing wave ratio requirement of <2 in the frequency band between 2.6 and 11.8 GHz except for the three rejected bands. According to the incident light, the physical properties of these switches can be changed from an insulator state (OFF state) to a near-conducting state (ON state). The incident light is coupled to the optical switches using a reconfigurable optical router. The proposed antenna provides high gain, and high efficiency all over the frequency band excluding the rejected bands.

The design of an analog frontend including a receiver amplifier (RX) and laser diode driver (LDD) for optical communication system is described. The RX consists of a transimpedance amplifier, a limiting amplifier, and an output buffer (BUF). An offset compensation and common-mode control circuit is designed using switched-capacitor technique to save chip area, provides continuous reduction of the offset in the RX. Active-peaking methods are used to enhance the bandwidth and gain. The very low gate-oxide breakdown voltage of transistors in deep sub-micron technologies is overcome in the LDD by implementing a topology which has the amplifier placed in a floating well. It comprises a level shifter, a pre-amplifier, and the driver stage. The single-chip frontend, fabricated in a 28 nm bulk-digital complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (CMOS) process has a total active area of 0.003 mm2, is among the smallest optical frontends. Without the BUF, which consumes 8 mW from a separate supply, the RX power consumption is 21 mW, while the LDD consumes 32 mW. Small-signal gain and bandwidth are measured. A photo diode and laser diode are bonded to the chip on a test-printed circuit board. Electro-optical measurements show an error-free detection with a bit error rate of 10−12 at 20 Gbit/s of the RX at and a 25 Gbit/s transmission of the LDD.

A study on the microwave performance of a metallic transmission line capable of simultaneously transmitting microwave and optical signals is presented targeting millimeter-long interconnects. Conventional analytical solution is used to find the optimal structure for a given characteristic impedance. Then, functionality of the link is validated through S-parameter measurements for 3–13 mm long lines. The waveguide parameters, such as resistance, inductance, capacitance, and conductance are extracted based on a lumped circuit model. The modeling enables structure optimization for interconnect bandwidth density of 1 Gb/s/μm and more.

Self-protection deceptive jammers create at the radar receiver output multiple-false targets that are impossible to isolate in both time and frequency domains. In this paper, we introduce a novel technique based on fractional Fourier transform (FrFT) to discriminate between the true target echo and those false targets in the case of frequency-shifting jammers. In fact, we exploit the capability of the FrFT to resolve, in a matched manner, spectra that are overlapping in time and frequency. This is a property that cannot be achieved using a standard matched filter. The theoretical analysis of this technique is presented and its effectiveness is verified by simulation.

In this paper, a coplanar waveguide (CPW)-fed dual-band uniplanar tri-polarization reconfigurable antenna based on the PIN diode switch is proposed. The proposed antenna can be reconfigured between the linear polarization (LP) and the circular polarization (CP) mode, including both the right-handed circular polarization and left-handed circular polarization simultaneously within the dual operating bands. The central frequencies of the bands are 2.63 and 4.42 GHz, respectively, and the overlapped operating bandwidth is 17.8 and 3.40%. The proposed reconfigurable antenna is a closed-slot antenna fed by the CPW transmission line and the reconfigurable mechanism is to regulate the T-shaped driven stub through switching the PIN diodes on and off. The scattering parameters, axial ratio, radiation pattern, gain, and the radiation efficiency of the proposed antenna are all investigated in the following. The optimized antenna has been fabricated to experimental test, the simulated and the measured results agree well with each other. The lower frequency band of the proposed antenna covers the 2.40 GHz WLAN specification and the upper band can be used for the 5 G communication (4.40–4.50 GHz); therefore it is suitable to be applied in the mobile wireless communication.

In this study, a dual-layered polarization and frequency reconfigurable microstrip antenna is proposed based on sequential mechanical axial rotation of the circular metal radiator. The antenna can be reconfigured among three different polarized modes, including the linear polarization (LP), left-handed circular polarization and right-handed circular polarization in the band from 4.68 to 4.80 GHz (2.53%). The resonance frequency of the proposed antenna with the same LP mode could also be tuned in the range from 4.70 to 5.03 GHz by mechanical rotation of the breach-truncated circular metal radiator as well as the circular substrate. Furthermore, the polarization characteristic and frequency can be reconfigured, respectively, as the circular radiator is taken an axial rotation with an angle of 360°. The presented antenna in the four different states has been numerically simulated and fabricated for the experimental measurement, the investigated characteristics includes the port reflection coefficient, axial ratio, radiation pattern, gain, and the radiation efficiency. The simulated and test results agreed well with each other. This antenna enriches the novel mechanical reconfigurable method except for the popular electrical approach.