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The E-Wall Concept/ Modular Antenna Systems for Indoor 5G NR Applications

Boek - Dissertatie

This thesis focuses on modular antenna systems for indoor 5G mm-wave NR applications. The idea is to implement integrated antenna arrays on the so-called "e-wall-paper", which will be attached to walls in any indoor environment. A variety of use cases can be foreseen, which are different in terms of the number of users and the coverage area. For example, it can be used for communications in small places like an apartment, an office, or a room, or for huge public places like a shopping mall, a cinema, or an airport hall, and even for private industrial environments. Due to this broad spectrum of use cases, there is no one-fits-all solution. But a variety of solutions should be created to provide the highest quality and most convenient service in these environments. We have developed several antenna modules, from simple to complicated, from cheap to more expensive, from low to high-performance. Compromising between performance, cost, and simplicity of usage, one of the solutions or a mix of them could be selected for a given environment. All the proposed modules are able to steer the beam. Because for 5G NR applications, beam-steering plays a critical role in better assigning resources to users. Furthermore, all the proposed modules can be used as a building block to construct larger arrays in case that a higher power handling or a finer beam resolution is needed. The modules can be used to develop larger fully analog or hybrid beam-forming architectures. We first develop a very simple and passive beam-switching module working at 6 GHz. A Butler matrix supports the array to shape directional beams. The design is realized by multilayer PCB technology, with the aim of reducing the implementation complexities and cost. Then active beam-forming tile sub-arrays at 28 GHz are introduced, performing a moderate compromise between cost and performance. The tiles are driven by analog beam-forming transceiver ICs. The main focus is to simplify the designs and finally they are realized by low-cost PCB technology. For the use cases that performance has a higher priority than cost, an antenna-in-package solution is introduced. The technical issue that is addressed in this design is related to the interconnection loss between the embedded circuits and the antennas. This loss increases at higher frequencies. The design is for the higher frequency band of 5G, hence 37- 40 GHz. Besides the proposed modules, a part of the research is related to the importance of mm-wave antenna characterization. Especially, in the case that there is an interaction between antennas and driven ICs. We address this challenge by a proper characterization of the antenna array and assessing the array S-matrix and the embedded single element radiation patterns. Further performance improvement can be achieved by optimizing array configuration and connecting the modules by high-performance transmission lines. These two topics are among the other research topics that are investigated in this thesis.
Jaar van publicatie:2022
Toegankelijkheid:Closed