Exact Analysis of the Wire-Bonded Multiconductor Transmission Line

In this paper, the exact model of a multiconductor transmission line with bonding wires is presented. The model is based on the multiport admittance matrix, and is valid for any number of conductors in the structure. The model shows how to compute the two-port admittance matrix of the wire-bonded structure with direct application to the wire-bonded interdigital capacitor. The model has been validated by means of method-of-moments-based numerical simulation and by experimental work.     

High-gain active composite right/left-handed leaky-wave antenna

A novel high-gain active composite right/left-handed (CRLH) metamaterial leaky-wave antenna (LWA) is presented. This antenna, which is designed to operate at broadside, is constituted by passive CRLH leaky-wave sections interconnected by amplifiers, which regenerate the power progressively leaked out of the structure in the radiation process in order to increase the effective aperture of the antenna and thereby its gain. The gain is further enhanced by a matching regeneration effect induced by the quasi-unilateral nature of the amplifiers. Both the cases of quasi-uniform and binomial field distributions, corresponding to maximum directivity and minimum side-lobe level, respectively, have been described. An active LWA prototype is demonstrated in transmission mode with a gain enhancement of 8.9 dB compared to its passive counterpart. The proposed antenna can attain an arbitrarily high gain by simple increase of the length of the structure, without penalty in terms of return loss and without requiring a complicated feeding network like conventional array antennas.     

Vertical microstrip transition for multilayer microwave circuits with decoupled passive and active layers

A novel broadband (including dc) microstrip-to-microstrip vertical transition for multilayer microwave circuits is proposed. This transition solves the problem of the discontinuity typically appearing in via hole transitions between two microstrip transmission lines in different layers. An analogy existing between this transition and a rectangular coaxial line is discussed. A parametric study alongside with the experimental results of the transition are presented. Reduction of local oscillator to radio frequency leakage in a mixer with this transition is demonstrated.