Seamless Integration of Active Antenna With Improved Power Efficiency

Abstract

Loss reduction to improve the power efficiency in active integrated antenna (AIA) is a key design drive. This paper first analyzes the loss mechanism in a convention AIA structure. A new integration scheme of a GaN power amplifier (PA) transistor with an antenna without using any output matching network (OMN) and harmonic tuning network (HTN) is then proposed to construct a seamlessly integrated AIA. This is achieved by a novel design of a slot antenna with optimized input impedance at its fundamental frequency as well as for harmonic tuning, which essentially absorbs the OMN and HTN functions in the conventional Class-F power amplifier design. By eliminating these passive networks between the transistor and the antenna, the associated insertion and mismatch losses as well as the overall circuit size are reduced. For verification, two prototypes are designed, fabricated and measured, one with the integrated design and the other with a conventional design for comparison. Both AIAs operate between 3.4 and 3.6 GHz. Experimental results show that the power-added efficiency (PAE) of the seamlessly integrated AIA is over 52% within the operating band. Compared with the conventional cascaded design of a PA and an antenna, the PAE is improved by 14.2%. INDEX TERMS Amplifier integrated antenna, active antenna, Class-F power amplifier, loss reduction, seamless integration.

Highly Integrated PA-PIFA With a Wide Frequency Tuning Range

“…A wideband input impedance transformer network is used to match the input RF signal. The performance of the PAIA is tested in a microwave chamber with a pre-amplifier to increase the input RF signal power to the desired level, following the test procedure in [16], [17].…”

“…Among them, the works in [7] and [12], as well as the type II in [16], have separate OMNs, and others are seamlessly integrated. The results in [16] show that PAIA employing direct matching can effectively reduce loss and enhance overall performance. However, all the previous works operate at a fixed frequency.…”

“…The output matching network (OMN) of transistor was replaced by the patch antenna to achieve compact size and high conversion gain. [16] presented a seamless integrated class-F PAIA. Compared with the conventional cascaded design of a PA and an antenna, the insertion loss was reduced by 0.95 dB and the corresponding power-add efficiency (PAE) was improved by 14.2%.…”

Chordal decomposition for spectral coarsening

“…We refer readers to [Cignoni et al 1998] for an overview and comparison of appearancepreserving simplification. Beyond preserving the appearance, these techniques have also been extended to preserve the texture information of a shape [Garland and Heckbert 1998;Lu et al 2020]. Li et al [2015] add modal displacement as part of the decimation metric to better preserve the acoustic transfer of a shape.…”

Co-Design and Validation Approach for Beam-Steerable Phased Arrays of Active Antenna Elements With Integrated Power Amplifiers

“…This approach is, however, not well suited for higher frequencies, due to the increasing power losses of matching circuits and harmonic filters introduced between the PAs and antennas. To overcome this problem, direct impedance matching between the PA and radiating element can be used, as was demonstrated in [7], [8] for PCB-based designs and [9] for the antenna-in-package architecture. Monolithic microwave integrated circuits (MMICs) is a popular alternative, offering compact design and high repeatability (see [10], [11]).…”