Ultra-wideband Antenna and Radio Front-end Systems

Sammanfattning: The number of wireless communication applications increase steadily, leading to the competition for currently allocated frequency bands. Pressure on authorities around the world to permit communications in higher and wider frequency ranges to achieve higher wireless capacity than those existed in the past has resulted in several new specifications. The federal communication commission (FCC) in USA has unleashed the band 3.1-10.6 GHz for ultra-wideband radio (UWB) communications. The release has triggered a worldwide interest for UWB. Other regulatory instances throughout the world have issued use of UWB techniques as well. Capacity issues in form of data rate and latency have always been a bottleneck for broadened wireless-communication usages. New communication systems like UWB require larger bandwidth than what is normally utilized with traditional antenna techniques. The interest for compact consumer electronics is growing in the meantime, creating a demand on efficient and low profile antennas which can be integrated on a printed circuit board. In this thesis, some methods to extend the bandwidth and other antenna parameters associated with wideband usages are studied. Furthermore, methods on how to enhance the performance when one antenna-element is not enough are studied as well.The principle of antenna parallelism is demonstrated using both microstrip patch antennas and inverted-F antennas. Several techniques to combine the antennas in parallel have been evaluated. Firstly, a solution using power-splitters to form sub-arrays that covers one 500-MHz multi-band orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) UWB is shown in Paper I. It is then proposed that the sub-bands are selected with a switching network. A more convenient method is to use the later developed frequency multiplexing technique as described in Paper V and VIII. Using the frequency multiplexing technique, selective connection of any number of antennas to a common junction is possible. The characteristic impedance is chosen freely, typically using a 50-? feed-line. Secondly, in Paper VIII a frequency-triplexed inverted-F antenna system is investigated to cover the Mode 1 multi-band UWB bandwidth 3.1-4.8 GHz. The antenna system is composed of three inverted-F antennas and a frequency triplexer including three 5th order bandpass filters. In Paper VI a printed circuit board integrated-triplexer for multi-band UWB radio is presented. The triplexer utilizes a microstrip network and three combined broadside- and edge-coupled filters. The triplexer is fully integrated in a four metal-layer printed circuit board with the minimum requirement on process tolerances. Furthermore, the system is built completely with distributed microstrips, i.e., no discrete components. Using the proposed solution an equal performance between the sub-bands is obtained. Finally suitable monopoles and dipoles are discussed and evaluated for UWB. In Paper X circular monopole and dipole antennas for UWB utilizing the flex-rigid concept are proposed. The flex-rigid concept combines flexible polyimide materials with the regular printed circuit board material. The antennas are placed entirely on the flexible part while the antenna ground plane and the dipole antenna balun are placed in the rigid part.