Composite metamaterial enabled excellent performance of microstrip antenna array

This paper reports that the split ring resonators and complementary split ring resonators are compounded to construct a novel compact composite metamaterial. The composite metamaterial exhibits a unique property of blocking electromagnetic wave propagating in two directions near the resonant frequency. An example of two-element microstrip antenna array demonstrates that the developed metamaterial enables array performance that is an improvement in comparison with the traditional one, including mutual coupling suppression of 9.07 dB, remarkable side lobe suppression and gain improvement of 2.14 dB. The mechanism of performance enhancement is analysed based on the electric field and Poynting vector distributions in array. The present work not only is a meaningful exploration of new type composite metamaterial design, but also opens up possibilities for extensive metamaterial applications to antenna engineer.

NOVEL ELECTRONIC TUNER USING VARACTORS FOR TUNABLE RF FRONT-ENDS

This paper presents a novel electronic tuner with high power handling capability utilizing varactors based on the asymmetric bilateral coupled microstrip transmission line. Through varying the bias voltage of the varactor at the Ultra High Frequency (UHF) band, the performance of the tuner is demonstrated according to simulated and measured results from several cases with the return loss (S11 ) below -20 dB and the insertion loss (S21 ) within ±0.5 dB. Compared with tuners using p and t network, electronic tuner of this paper shows superior frequency agility as well as wide impendence coverage. Advanced biasing structure has been developed to improve power handling for high power level applications. It is expected that the novel tuner would be part of intelligent Radio Frequency (RF) front-ends system and cognitive wireless system in the future.

Electromagnetic coupling reduction in dual-band microstrip antenna array using ultra-compact single-negative electric metamaterials for MIMO application

In this paper, an ultra-compact single negative（SNG） electric waveguided metamaterial（WG-MTM） is first investigated and used to reduce the mutual coupling in E ＆ H planes of a dual-band microstrip antenna array. The proposed SNG electric WG-MTM unit cell is designed by etching two different symmetrical spiral lines on the ground, and has two stopbands operating at 1.86 GHz and 2.40 GHz. The circuit size is very compact, which is only λ_0/33.6 ×λ_0/15.1（where λ_0 is the wavelength at 1.86 GHz in free space）. Taking advantage of the dual-stopband property of the proposed SNG electric WG-MTM, a dual-band microstrip antenna array operating at 1.86 GHz and 2.40 GHz with very low mutual coupling is designed by embedding a cross shaped array of the proposed SNG electric WG-MTM. The measured and simulated results of the designed dual-band antenna array are in good agreement with each other, indicating that the mutual coupling of the fabricated dual-band antenna array realizes 9.8/11.1 d B reductions in the H plane, 8.5/7.9 d B reductions in the E plane at1.86 GHz and 2.40 GHz, respectively. Besides, the distance of the antenna elements in the array is only 0.35 λ_0（where λ_0 is the wavelength at 1.86 GHz in free space）. The proposed strategy is used for the first time to reduce the mutual coupling in E ＆ H planes of the dual-band microstrip antenna array by using ultra-compact SNG electric WG-MTM.