Substrate integrated waveguide devices and receiver systems for millimeter-wave applications

The heavily congested condition at the existing radio frequency (RF)/microwave spectra allocated for the today's wireless communications motivates and expedites the research work at millimeter-wave bands where more spectrum space is available for massive data rate delivery. Compared with other transmission line techniques, the substrate integrated waveguide (SIW) platform shows attractive advantages of low profile, low-cost, high Q-factor, and low insertion loss, etc. It has gained a lot of attention recently due to its favorable features in millimeter-wave circuit/system design.;The topic of this doctoral dissertation are concerned with two distinct research tasks: (1) investigating and designing innovative SIW components and antennas for possible millimeter-wave applications; (2) developing and demonstrating geometry-compact, low cost, high level of integration and high performance millimeter-wave receiver systems.;Chapters 1 to 4 focus on the exploitation and investigation of individual SIW devices, in which a number of original concepts and innovative structures are proposed and demonstrated. In Chapter 5, generic architectures and parameters of receiver systems are discussed and used as a guideline for the millimeter-wave system design in the next chapters. From Chapter 6 to Chapter 8, sub-millimeter/ millimeter wave systems based on SIW technique are demonstrated.;The major contributions of this thesis work can be highlighted as follows: (1) An inherent broadband balanced structure can be achieved by printing circuits on two opposite sides of an SIW substrate. According to this feature, a broadband SIW planar balun implemented on a single layer printed circuit board (PCB) is proposed and presented, following which another newly proposed broadband microstrip-to-broadside parallel stripline transition is demonstrated. With the proposed transition as the feeding network, a novel broadband printed quasi-Yagi antenna is developed. (2) Half-mode substrate integrated waveguide (HMSIW) and quarter-mode substrate integrated waveguide (QMSIW) techniques are introduced for the purpose of miniaturizing SIW circuits and enhancing the bandwidth. The HMSIW and QMSIW structures are generated by bisecting SIWs with fictitious magnetic walls. A broadband HMSIW Wilkinson power divider is developed, which successfully integrates a resistor branch with the SIW structure to guarantee good output matching and isolation. Furthermore, two C-band QMSIW Chebychev filters are proposed and demonstrated for wide band applications. (3) A broadband phase shifter that makes use of non-radiating longitudinal slots in the broad wall of an SIW is presented. The proposed broadband phase shifter is developed on the basis of a dispersive phenomenon of SIW and slotted SIW lines. The design concept is developed on different propagation constants of TE10 mode and quasi-TEM mode, which are the fundamental modes of SIWs and our proposed slotted SIWs, respectively. (4) A novel sub-harmonic self-oscillating mixer (SOM) topology that makes use of the transmission characteristics of two operating modes in an SIW cavity is proposed. The SOM circuit consists of a dual-mode SIW band-pass filter, a common source hetero-junction FET and a low-pass filter. The fundamental mode (H101) of the SIW cavity is used for RF mode operation while the H202 mode is used for local oscillation. (5) A broadband millimeter-wave single balanced diode mixer that makes use of an innovative SIW based 180-degree hybrid is presented. Furthermore, a receiver front-end that integrates a high-performance SIW slot array antenna and the proposed mixer is developed. Subsequently, a wireless communication system with M-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (M-QAM) is demonstrated for line-of-sight (LOS) channels. (6) A novel SOM-based receiver front-end is proposed, which deploys an injection locking scheme in order to improve the frequency stability and phase noise of the oscillating signal. The proposed SOM makes use of the transmission characteristics of two operating modes in an SIW cavity. As such, the proposed receiver front-end has the advantages of low phase noise and decent isolation between RF and local oscillator (LO) signals. (7) A 60 GHz substrate integrated transceiver system with a broad bandwidth up to 3 GHz is presented. The proposed integration technique of planar and non-planar structures allows the design of passive components and active devices within a single package. The passive circuits and high-gain antennas are integrated together with monolithic microwave integrated circuits (MMICs) by simple wire-bonding process.