In order to improve the antenna gain, a composite right/left-handed (CRLH) leaky-wave (LW) antenna composed of symmetrical unit cells with short stubs terminated by vertical vias is designed. The use of symmetrical unit cells suppresses the cross-polarization of radiation to less than 23 dB. By comparing the measured radiation characteristics to that of a conventional CRLH LW antenna without short stub in the X-band, it is shown that the presented CRLH LW antenna with 51 unit cells offers a narrower beam and the antenna gain improves 4.1, 2.2 and 3.1 dB in the backward, broadside and forward directions of radiation, respectively.

We propose a new type of microstrip line to waveguide transition fabricated on a single layer dielectric substrate. Impedance matching of the transition is achieved by controlling the size of a matching element and the length of an inserted microstrip line across a waveguide. As a result of experiments, low transmission loss of 0.4 dB is realized at the design frequency of 76.5 GHz. Bandwidth of the transition is numerically investigated by the finite element method. It is clarified that the bandwidth of the transition becomes wider as the cross section of the waveguide becomes smaller and twice as wide as that of a conventional microstrip patch antenna element fabricated on a dielectric substrate with the same parameters. In addition, the effect of errors in relative position between the dielectric substrate and the waveguide is also investigated. It becomes clear that degradation of transmission characteristics is caused by the shift of resonant frequency and keeps less than 0.1 dB for a manufacturing accuracy within 0.1 mm.

Digital Terrestrial Television (DTV) services began in Japan in December 2003. This paper proposes a novel on-glass antenna for mobile reception of terrestrial television. The gain of the proposed antenna is 4.7 dB higher than commercial monopole antennas when installed on a vehicle. Other merits of this antenna are a broad input impedance bandwidth across the UHF band (470-710 MHz), and the fact that it does not spoil vehicle appearance. Field experiments have confirmed that a diversity system using four of the proposed antennas is capable of mobile DTV reception.

In this paper, a new architecture of Multilayer Neural Network (MNN) with on-chip learning for effective hardware implementation is proposed. To reduce the circuit size, threshold function is used as neuron's activating function and simplified back-propagation algorithm is employed to provide on-chip learning capability. The derivative of the activating function is modified to improve the rate of successful learning. The learning performance of the proposed architecture is tested by system-level simulations. Simulation results show that the modified derivative function improves the rate of successful learning and that the proposed MNN has a good generalization capability. Furthermore, the proposed architecture is implemented on field programmable gate array (FPGA). Logic-level simulation and preliminary experiment are conducted to test the on-chip learning mechanism.

A novel structure for a frequency-independent steerable composite right/left-handed (CRLH) leaky wave (LW) antenna in the millimeter-wave band is proposed. This has the advantages of wide beam scanning and low profile, and is a suitable structure for mass-production. The proposed antenna has features wherein a movable dielectric slab is placed above the CRLH LW antenna, and the radiation angle can be steered by changing the distance between the slab and the antenna using compact actuators. Moreover, slots are added to the antenna to control the aperture amplitude distribution of the array antenna in order to enhance aperture efficiency. A prototype CRLH LW antenna has been fabricated with these slots, and backward-to-forward beam scanning characteristics at 76 GHz have been demonstrated successfully by measurement. A wide scanning angle from 73 to 114 deg. has been achieved experimentally. The aperture efficiency is 25.3%.

A novel millimeter-wave slotted waveguide array antenna is developed for automotive radar systems. An antenna structure suitable for mass-production is proposed in this paper. The waveguide is composed of two parts; an upper plate and a bottom plate. It is not necessary to contact each other closely because they are divided at the center of the broad wall of the waveguide where the electric current is small. In addition, grating lobes are suppressed by using a cylindrical cavity around each slot and by controlling the slot arrangement without using dielectric material in the waveguide. We have fabricated the proposed antenna by metal injection molding. The measured antenna efficiency results in 55%, which is quite high in comparison with any other conventional low cost millimeter-wave antenna. This efficiency is almost the same as that of the antenna fabricated by precision metal machining. In this paper, it is confirmed that the proposed antenna could be manufactured with low cost.

A planar composite right/left-handed leaky wave antenna which operates at W-band is fabricated and its backward to forward beam scanning operation including broadside direction is confirmed experimentally. The scanning angle from 61 to 114 degrees with a frequency scanning range of 76 to 79 GHz is achieved.

A microstrip array antenna with 45-degree inclined linear polarization is proposed for automotive radars. The proposed antenna has the advantages of high aperture efficiency, low profile and ease of manufacture. The rectangular radiating elements inclined at 45 degrees to the straight microstrip line are directly connected to it at their corners in the proposed array antenna. The radiating element has a feature that radiation conductance for co-polarization is controlled widely enough to set desired amplitude distribution keeping excited mode for cross-polarization negligibly small. The feed line loss of the linear array antenna having 15 wavelengths is estimated 0.9 dB in the design taking the loss of the microstrip line into account. The performance of two types of developed antennas, for electrical and mechanical scanning radars, is presented. The fan beam subarray antenna for electrical scanning radars has an aperture efficiency of 53% with gain of 22.5 dBi at 76.5 GHz. For mechanical scanning radars, the two-stage series feeding circuit is also proposed for lower feed line loss and setting desired amplitude distribution. The pencil beam array antenna has an aperture efficiency of 39% with gain of 32.2 dBi at 76.5 GHz.

The optical properties of arrays of nanoholes and nanoslits in Al films were investigated both numerically and experimentally. The choice of Al was based on its low cost and ease of processing, in addition to the fact that it has a higher plasma frequency than gold or silver, leading to lower optical losses at wavelengths of 400 to 500nm.

We investigate the usefulness of the topology optimization with the finite element method in the optimization of an H-plane waveguide component. Design sensitivity is computed efficiently using the adjoint variable method. Employing the optimization procedure, optimized structures of an H-plane waveguide filter and T-junction are obtained from an initial homogeneous structure.

We investigated optical transmission characteristics of aluminum thin films with periodic hole arrays in sub-wavelength. We divided white light into several color spectra using a color filter based on the surface plasmon resonance (SPR) utilizing aluminum showing high plasma frequency. By optimizing a hole-array period, hole shape, polarization and index difference of two surface, transmittance of 30% and full-width at half-maximum of around 100 nm were achieved.

This paper reviews our recent activities on nanophotonics based on a photonic crystal (PC)/quantum dot (QD)-combined structure for an all-optical device and a metal/semiconductor composite structure using surface plasmon (SP) and negative refractive index material (NIM). The former structure contributes to an ultrafast signal processing component by virtue of new PC design and QD selective-area-growth technologies, while the latter provides a new RGB color filter with a high precision and optical beam-steering device with a wide steering angle.