ALBERT

Description: Monitoring physiological signs in animal testing is crucial for the development of new therapeutic strategies and better understanding of diseases. This paper exploits Doppler radar and nonlinear phase demodulation effect to achieve noncontact measurement of both displacements and frequencies of a laboratory rat’s cardiorespiratory activities. The implementation of displacement acquisition method relying on demodulation-generated harmonics is described, and this paper provides a guideline of implementing the acquisition method. Demodulation-generated harmonics are analyzed, and the effect of vibration-generated harmonics is studied. To demonstrate the effectiveness, a 60-GHz radar is used that shows good correlation with the instrument-recorded data. Average errors of respiration rate and heart rate (HR) are 0.057% and 0.33%, respectively, using three test subjects. In addition, two drug tests are performed to verify the monitoring function with controlled raised/dropped HR. By observing the time periods before, during, and after drug injection, results of rat’s physiological response to drugs reveal the drug efficacy and body reaction over time. The measured cardiorespiratory variations can provide useful information without using implant devices, and the implementation could be an improvement over current invasive methods. The result presented in this paper is believed to be the first reported simultaneous measurements of both frequencies and displacements of both respiration and heartbeat movements of a laboratory animal using microwave radar.

Description: Noncontact physiological monitoring using Doppler radar has been studied extensively. Most commonly, continuous-wave (CW) quadrature Doppler radar is used to measure cardiopulmonary rates. Accurate displacement measurement can provide physiological waveform recovery, which may enable tidal volume and pulse pressure estimation. In this paper, we propose a calibration technique that enables high-accuracy millimeter-order periodic displacement measurements using CW quadrature Doppler radar. Theoretical analysis of center estimation error and its propagation effect are presented. Simulations are performed to show how noise and limited arc length affect error and affect the accuracy of center estimation, as well as improvements after calibration. A high-precision linear stage was employed to create periodic motion for evaluating the performance of calibration technique. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed calibration technique enables displacement measurement with accuracy within tens of micrometers.

Description: Spatial diversity cross-polar approach to fast electromagnetic imaging of millimeter-wave chipless radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags is proposed. Slow imaging in the synthetic aperture radar (SAR) technique due to the moving reader antenna is replaced by a stationary multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) array antenna. The proposed MIMO technique requires a large number of antenna elements, which impedes practical implementation of the reader. An optimized MIMO system through a genetic algorithm halves the number of antenna elements and successfully replaces the conventional SAR. The optimized antenna system combines with the original spatial diversity approach to provide a low-cost solution for chipless RFID tagging with enhanced content capacity. The system successfully decodes a 60-GHz 17-b chipless tag in an area that is one fifth of a credit card. The tag can be printed with a low-resolution printer and read on metal and liquid containers.

Description: A novel method to generate frequency-multiplied and phase-coded microwave signals based on a polarization division multiplexing (PDM) dual-arm Mach–Zehnder modulator (DMZM) or a PDM dual-parallel MZM (DPMZM) is proposed. In the proposed scheme, the PDM-DMZM or PDM-DPMZM is employed to produce two orthogonally polarized wavelengths with a wavelength spacing that is two, four, or eight times of the driving frequency. Then the signal is sent into a polarization modulator-based microwave photonic phase coder for phase coding. A theoretical analysis and an experiment are carried out. Phase-coded signals with frequency multiplication factors of two, four and eight are successfully generated. The bandwidth of the system is discussed, and the impact of the polarization extinction ratio is also analyzed.

Description: A methodology is presented to analyze the impact of the termination load on the oscillation frequency and output power of autonomous circuits. Variations of this load can also lead to an extinction of the oscillation signal, due to their effect on the impedance seen by the active device(s). The new methodology enables an efficient analysis and mitigation of the pulling effects, in the case of undesired output mismatch, as well as an efficient oscillator synthesis in large-signal conditions, for specified values of oscillation frequency and output power. The method is based on the calculation of constant-amplitude and constant-frequency contours, traced in the Smith chart. Oscillation extinctions and some forms of hysteresis can be predicted through the inspection of these contours. However, the stability properties will generally depend on the frequency characteristic of the termination impedance. In an oscillator synthesis, the selected impedance, providing the specified values of oscillation frequency and output power, must be implemented in order to guarantee a stable solution. The dependence of the phase-noise spectral density on the particular implementation is predicted, combining an analysis based on the variance of the phase deviation with the conversion-matrix approach.

Description: Microdispensing of thick-film conductive paste has been demonstrated as a viable approach for manufacturing microwave planar transmission lines. However, the performance and upper frequency range of these lines is limited by the cross-sectional shape and electrical conductivity of the printed paste, as well as the achievable minimum feature size which is typically around $100~\mu \text{m}$ . In this paper, a picosecond Nd:YAG laser is used to machine slots in a 20–25- $\mu \text{m}$ -thick layer of silver paste (Dupont CB028) that is microdispensed on a Rogers RT5870 substrate, producing coplanar waveguide (CPW) transmission lines with 16– $20~\mu \text{m}$ -wide slots. It is shown that the laser solidifies an about 2- $\mu \text{m}$ -wide region of the edges of the slots, thus significantly increasing the effective conductivity of the film and improving the attenuation constant of the lines. The extracted attenuation constant at 20 GHz for laser machined CB028 is 0.74 dB/cm. CPW resonators and filters show that the effective conductivity is in the range from 10 to 30 MS/m, which represents a $100\times $ improvement when compared to the values obtained with the exclusive use of microdispensing. This paper demonstrates that a hybrid approach of additive manufacturing and laser machining enables the fabrication of higher frequency circuits (up to at least 40 GHz) with improved performance.

Description: Tunable matching networks (MNs) are essential components for agile radio frequency systems. To optimally design such networks, the total area they cover on the Smith chart needs to be determined. In this paper, the coverage areas of typical MNs have been determined analytically for the first time. It has been found that the coverage area is encompassed by up to five arcs. Analytical expressions for the centers and radii for these arcs have been derived. The theoretical analysis is provided for four typical MNs and verified by circuit simulation and measured data. Moreover, a dynamically load-modulated power amplifier has been designed using the presented theoretical techniques, which demonstrates a measured improvement in the power added efficiency of up to 5% in the frequency range of (0.8–0.9) GHz.

Description: This paper presents a highly linear cascode power amplifier (PA) for 5-GHz 802.11ac (wireless local area network) WLAN applications, which is fabricated with a 0.13- $\mu \text{m}$ standard RF CMOS process. A parallel-cascoded configuration is proposed to cancel out third and fifth intermodulation distortions and third harmonic distortion (HD) due to drain–source current nonlinearity. This also reduces distortions due to drain–source and gate-source nonlinear capacitances at both common source (CS) and common gate (CG) stages. The configuration allows the amplifier linear characteristics to be robust against gate node voltage variations of CG transistors compared to previous multigated transistor linearization methods, because the CG transistors always remain in the saturation region and the nonlinearities of capacitances associated with CG transistors cancel each other under a wide range of output powers. In addition, an active feedback linearizer is applied to improve AM–AM and the power-added efficiency (PAE) at high output powers. At 5.15 GHz, the proposed PA is tested with a 256-quadrature amplitude modulation WLAN 802.11ac signal source without digital predistortions. The output powers satisfying the stringent linearity, a −35-dB error vector magnitude, are 17.8, 17.3, and 15.6 dBm with 11.5%, 10.4%, and 7.5% PAEs at 20, 40, and 80 MHz, respectively.

Description: Multimode transceivers for the next generation of wireless devices require new and innovative frequency-agile microwave circuit designs to reduce their complexity, size, and cost. Intrinsically switchable frequency reconfigurable thin-film bulk acoustic resonators (FBARs) and filters that utilize these resonators are presented here for the very first time. Barium strontium titanate (BST) is a ferroelectric material that exhibits electric-field-induced piezoelectricity, which allows for the design of voltage controlled bulk acoustic wave devices. In this paper, a frequency reconfigurable resonator consisting of two series connected BST-based FBARs and a reconfigurable dual-band filter consisting of two 1.5 stage ladder-type bandpass filters are discussed. Their small size, simple design, and zero static power consumption make multifunctional ferroelectric thin-film devices attractive for use in adaptive and reconfigurable radios.