A novel design technique for two-dimensional (2-D) waveguide slot arrays is proposed in this paper that combines a full-wave method of moments (MoM) analysis and an equivalent circuit with the explicit restraint of input matching. The admittance and slot spacing are determined first in an equivalent circuit to realize the desired distribution of power dissipation and phase, with the explicit restraint of input matching. Secondly by applying a full-wave MoM analysis to the finite 2-D array, slot parameters are iteratively determined to realize the active admittance designed above where slot mutual coupling and wall thickness are fully taken into account. The admittance, treated as the key parameter in the equivalent circuit corresponds to the power dissipation of the slots but not to the slot voltage, which is directly synthesized from the radiation pattern. The initial value of the power dissipation is assumed to be proportional to the square of the amplitude of the desired slot voltage. This assumption leads to a feedback procedure, because the resultant slot voltage distribution generally differs from the desired ones due to the effect of non-uniformity in the characteristic impedance on slot apertures. This slot voltage error is used to renew the initial distribution of power dissipation in the equivalent circuit. Generally, only one feedback cycle is needed. Two 2427-element arrays with uniform and Taylor distributions were designed and fabricated at 25.3 GHz. The measured overall reflections for both antennas were suppressed below -18 dB over the 24.3-26.3 GHz frequency range. High aperture efficiencies of 86.8% and 55.1% were realized for the antennas with uniform and Taylor distributions, the latter of which has very low sidelobes below -33 dB in both the E- and H-planes.

A point-to-point fixed wireless access (FWA) system with a maximum throughput of 1Gbps has been developed in the 39GHz band. A double-layer plate-laminated waveguide slot array antenna is successfully realized with specific considerations of practical application. The antenna is designed so as to hold the VSWR under 1.5. The antenna input as well as feeding network is configured to reduce the antenna profile as well as the antenna weight. In addition, integrating the antenna into a wireless terminal is taken into account. A shielding wall, whose effectiveness is experimentally demonstrated, is set in the middle of the wireless terminal to achieve the spatial isolation of more than 65dB between two antennas on the H-plane. 30 test antennas are fabricated by diffusion bonding of thin metal plates, to investigate the tolerance and mass-productivity of this process. An aluminum antenna, which has the advantages of light weight and anti-aging, is also fabricated and evaluated with an eye to the future.

A TM010 cavity power combiner is presented, which achieves direct interface to microstrip lines via magnetic field coupling. A prototype is fabricated and its S-matrix measured. From the S-parameters we calculate that it shows less than 0.85 dB insertion loss over 250 MHz bandwidth at X-band. The return power to the input ports is less than -15 dB over this bandwidth. We verify the insertion loss estimation using S-matrix, by measuring transmission S-parameter of a concatenated 2-port divider-combiner network. Similarly analyzed is the case of performance of power combiner when one of the input fails. We find that we can achieve graceful degradation provided we ensure some particular reflection phase at the degraded port.

In this work, we investigate a joint transmit beamforming and artificial noise (AN) covariance matrix design in a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) cognitive radio (CR) downlink network with simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT), where the malicious energy receivers (ERs) may decode the desired information and hence can be treated as potential eavesdroppers (Eves). In order to improve the secure performance of the transmission, AN is embedded to the information-bearing signal, which acts as interference to the Eves and provides energy to all receivers. Specifically, this joint design is studied under a practical non-linear energy harvesting (EH) model, our aim is to maximize the secrecy rate at the SR subject to the transmit power budget, EH constraints and quality of service (QoS) requirement. The original problem is not convex and challenging to be solved. To circumvent its intractability, an equivalent reformulation of this secrecy rate maximization (SRM) problem is introduced, wherein the resulting problem is primal decomposable and thus can be handled by alternately solving two convex subproblems. Finally, numerical results are presented to verify the effectiveness of our proposed scheme.

As a promising lamination-loss-free fabrication technique, diffusion bonding of etched thin metal plates is used to realize double-layer waveguide slot antennas. Alternating-phase feed is adopted in this paper to reduce the number of laminated plates to simplify fabrication as well as to reduce cost. A 20 × 20-element double-layer waveguide slot antenna with a bottom partially-corporate feed circuit is designed for 39GHz band operation as an example. The adjacent radiating waveguides as well as the 2 × 2 sub-arrays fed in an alternating-phase manner eliminate the need for complete electrical contact in the top layer. However, the feed circuit in the bottom layer has to be completely diffusion-bonded. These two layers are simply assembled by screws. An antenna laminated by only diffusion bonding is also fabricated and evaluated for comparison. The comparison proved that the simply fabricated antenna is comparable in performance to the fully diffusion-bonded one.

This paper introduces an energy-efficient transmit design for multiple-input single-output (MISO) energy-harvesting cognitive radio (CR) networks in the presence of external eavesdroppers (Eves). Due to the inherent characteristics of CR network with simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT), Eves may illegitimately access the primary user (PU) bands, and the confidential message is prone to be intercepted in wireless communications. Assuming the channel state information (CSI) of the Eves is not perfectly known at the transmitter, our approach to guaranteeing secrecy is to maximize the secrecy energy efficiency (SEE) by jointly designing the robust beamforming and the power splitting (PS) ratio, under the constraints of total transmit power, harvested energy at secondary receiver (SR) and quality of service (QoS) requirement. Specifically, a non-linear energy harvesting (EH) model is adopted for the SR, which can accurately characterize the property of practical RF-EH circuits. To solve the formulated non-convex problem, we first employ fractional programming theory and penalty function to recast it as an easy-to-handle parametric problem, and then deal with the non-convexity by applying S-Procedure and constrained concave convex procedure (CCCP), which enables us to exploit the difference of concave functions (DC) programming to seek the maximum worst-case SEE. Finally, numerical results are presented to verify the performance of the proposed scheme.

A 12×16-element corporate-feed slot array is presented. The corporate-feed circuit for the 12×16-elemtent array consists of cross-junctions and asymmetric T-junctions, whereas the conventional one is limited to arrays of 2m×2n slots by its use of symmetric T-junctions. Simulations of the 12×16-element array show a 7.6% bandwidth for reflection less than -14dB. A 31.7-dBi gain with an antenna efficiency of 82.6% is obtained at the design frequency of 61.5GHz. The 12×16-element array is fabricated by diffusion bonding of laminated thin metal plates. Measurements indicate 31.1-dBi gain with 71.9% antenna efficiency at 61.5GHz.

A round-ended wide straight slot cut in the broad wall of a rectangular waveguide is analyzed by the Method of Moments (MoM) using numerical eigenmode basis functions derived by the edge-based finite element method (FEM), referred to as MoM/FEM. The frequency characteristics of the calculated transmission coefficients are compared with the measured ones, and good agreement is observed for a wide variety of antenna parameters. For simpler analysis that does not use MoM/FEM, an equivalent rectangular slot approximation for a round-ended slot is discussed. The resonant frequencies of empirically introduced "equal-area" and "equal-perimeter" slots are compared with those of round-ended slots for a wide variety of parameters such as slot width, wall thickness and dielectric constant inside the waveguide. Based upon MoM/FEM, which can be a reliable reference, it is found that the equal-area slot always gives a better approximation of the order of 1% over that of the equal-perimeter one which is of the order of 5%. For higher accuracy, a new rectangular slot approximation of a round-ended slot is proposed to be a linear combination of equal-area and equal perimeter approximation. The error is around 0.25% for a wide variety of parameters such as slot width-to-length ratio, wall thickness and dielectric constant of the filling material inside the waveguide.

Introducing diffusion bonding of laminated thin metal plates to the fabrication of slotted waveguide arrays enlightens the high potential and the feasibility of multi-layer antennas with high-performance. It is a promising process with low cost even for a double-layer antenna, because the number of etching patterns for thin metal plates is only five. In this paper, a double-layer antenna for broadband characteristics is designed in 39 GHz band as demonstration. A 20 20-element antenna is composed of 2 2 sub-arrays by installing a partially-corporate feed circuit in the bottom layer underneath radiating waveguides in the top layer. The five-element sub-arrays in both the feeding and radiating parts are designed first. A new structure for the last slot coupler with shortened termination is also proposed to avoid an extra slot-free region when assembling the neighbor sub-arrays. As the simulation results by HFSS, the maximum gain of 34.55 dBi with the antenna efficiency of 85.5% is estimated at 38.5 GHz. The test antenna is fabricated by the diffusion bonding of thin copper plates. As the measurement results, a very high aperture efficiency of 83.2% with the directivity of 34.5 dBi is realized at the center frequency of 38.75 GHz, where the antenna gain of 34.4 dBi with the high antenna efficiency of 81.4% is achieved. The bandwidth of 5.0% defined as 1 dB down from the maximum gain is achieved.

In this paper, a three-way divider is proposed for a partially-corporate feed in an alternating phase-fed single-layer slotted waveguide array. The divider is placed at the middle of the feed waveguide and reduces the long line effects; the frequency bandwidth is doubled. It is a kind of cross junction with one input port and three output ports; most of the power is equally divided into the right and left halves of the feed waveguide while the rest of power goes straight into the center radiating waveguide. Based upon the moment method design of the three-way divider, an inductive post is introduced for wide band power dividing control to the radiating waveguide. Reflection is below -20 dB over a wide bandwidth of 24.3-26.3 GHz, and the range of power dividing ratio ranges from 1/43 to 1/4. The amplitude and the phase from the two output ports to the feed waveguide are well balanced, and the differences are less than 0.1 dB and 5.0 degrees, respectively. The MoM analysis and the wide band design are verified experimentally in the 4 GHz band.

A generalized covariance matrix taper (GCMT) model is proposed to enhance the performance of knowledge-aided space-time adaptive processing (KA-STAP) under sea clutter environments. In KA-STAP, improving the accuracy degree of the a priori clutter covariance matrix is a fundamental issue. As a crucial component in the a priori clutter covariance matrix, the taper matrix is employed to describe the internal clutter motion (ICM) or other subspace leakage effects, and commonly constructed by the classical covariance matrix taper (CMT) model. This work extents the CMT model into a generalized CMT (GCMT) model with a greater degree of freedom. Comparing it with the CMT model, the proposed GCMT model is more suitable for sea clutter background applications for its improved flexibility. Simulation results illustrate the efficiency of the GCMT model under different sea clutter environments.

Lightweight single-layer slotted waveguide array antennas are fabricated using plastic materials with metal-plating. A plastic material that has good heat-radiation properties is investigated. Three types of antennas are fabricated by milling, using ABS resin, heat-radiating plastic, and aluminum alloy. In measurements, all three types of antennas are confirmed to have almost the same VSWR and gain in the 25 GHz frequency band.