Giandomenico Amendola | Università della Calabria (original) (raw)

Papers by Giandomenico Amendola

IEEE Microwave and Wireless Components Letters, Dec 1, 2022

This letter presents a novel vertical waveguide-tomicrostrip self-diplexing transition for dual-b... more This letter presents a novel vertical waveguide-tomicrostrip self-diplexing transition for dual-band applications. The transition is realized with standard printed circuit board (PCB) manufacturing processing, making it suitable for mass production and practical applications. A standard waveguide is screwed on the topside of the stack-up. Dual-band self-diplexing operation is achieved by coupling two microstrips (one for each band) to two radiating patches through H-shaped slots. The operating bandwidth has been enhanced by adding two parasitic patches above the radiating ones. Metalized via holes are used to form a cage around the rectangular waveguide and the microstrips to prevent power leakage. A prototype has been fabricated to operate at K/Ka frequency band. The experimental results show a -10 dB matching bandwidth of 20% and 14% for the lower and upper bands, respectively. Within these ranges, the maximum measured insertion loss is about 0.6 and 0.7 dB, respectively.

2020 14th European Conference on Antennas and Propagation (EuCAP)

Magneto Electric (ME) dipoles have been widely studied over the last few years. They are becoming... more Magneto Electric (ME) dipoles have been widely studied over the last few years. They are becoming increasingly popular as they allow to generate a wide bandwidth in a printed circuit board (PCB). Nevertheless, their principle of operation requires the use of relatively thick substrates (i.e. about 0. 25λ0, where λ0 is the free-space wavelength) thus resulting in a bulky stack-up. This work tackles this problem by proposing a new type of low -profile ME dipole. The proposed configuration is fed using a slot-coupled microstrip line feed and it employs bandwidth enhancement solutions previously used in metal-only structures. As a result, an ultrathin antenna is achieved which operates over a 20% bandwidth at Ka-band while using an ultrathin dielectric layer being the antenna thickness equal to 0.082 λ0. Moreover, the antenna has a gain of about 5.5 dBi across the entire bandwidth, which makes the proposed design suitable for next generation 5G base stations.

2016 46th European Microwave Conference (EuMC), 2016

The paper presents a K/Ka band radiating element for TX/RX phased arrays. Dual band operations is... more The paper presents a K/Ka band radiating element for TX/RX phased arrays. Dual band operations is obtained using a single radiating surface: a novel radiator is adopted and placed in a configuration in which dual band and single band elements are interleaved. The array elements are optimized to scan the beam in excess of 50° in both bands. A subarray with 49 Rx elements and 105 Tx elements was built and measured confirming the results obtained in simulations.

2012 42nd European Microwave Conference, 2012

ABSTRACT In this work, preliminary results of a study on printed power combiners configurations f... more ABSTRACT In this work, preliminary results of a study on printed power combiners configurations for power-amplifier applications are presented. The proposed configuration is based on Substrate Integrated Waveguide (SIW) and multilayer PCB technologies. In particular, a printed horn combiner/divider was considered as a basic building block of a power combining amplifier. Simulated results of the passive combiners will be presented and discussed along with measured results.

2017 IEEE International Symposium on Antennas and Propagation & USNC/URSI National Radio Science Meeting, 2017

2015 9th European Conference on Antennas and Propagation (EuCAP), 2015

In this paper, a new miniaturized design of on-chip 4×4 Butler matrix implemented in SiGe BiCMOS ... more In this paper, a new miniaturized design of on-chip 4×4 Butler matrix implemented in SiGe BiCMOS technology is presented. The proposed Butler matrix was designed using two different approaches operating at the same frequency of 5.5 GHz. In a first example, a miniaturized lumped element design was implemented by increasing the density of the individual elements on the chip. A reduction of the chip area was achieved by simulating the entire structure with FEM based commercial software and by carefully evaluating mutual coupling effects. In a second design, a more innovative approach was taken into account by implementing the 90 degree hybrid through an on-chip transformer. Thanks to this solution, it was possible to achieve a considerable reduction of the chip area and an improvement of the Butler matrix performance both in terms of phase linearity and in terms of operating bandwidth.

2019 13th European Conference on Antennas and Propagation (EuCAP), 2019

The experimental assessment of a highly integrated dual-band (9.6 and 35.75 GHz) dual-polarized a... more The experimental assessment of a highly integrated dual-band (9.6 and 35.75 GHz) dual-polarized antenna tile designed for Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) Digital Beam Forming (DBF) satellite applications is presented. Antennas, transitions and down-conversion chips are integrated in the same board fabricated using a customized 15 layer PCB. The experimental assessment proves the validity of the proposed manufacturing and integration approaches, a good agreement between the performance of the individual blocks and of the integrated system has been demonstrated.

2021 15th European Conference on Antennas and Propagation (EuCAP), 2021

This work proposes an 8×8 D-band antenna array constructed from 64 stepped horns. The structure i... more This work proposes an 8×8 D-band antenna array constructed from 64 stepped horns. The structure is designed to be machined from single metallic block adhered with an additional bottom metallic cover. The proposed design can be realized using low-cost commercially accessible milling tools. The configuration at hand is composed of three building blocks: transition, power divider and horn radiator. The array footprint has a volume of 30×30×8 mm3 while a 29.5% fractional bandwidth is achieved from 130 till 175 GHz where reflection coefficient is lower than 7.8 dB. Radiation characteristics are investigated for both single horn radiator and 8×8 antenna arrays where the obtained average gain values are 15.25 and 32 dBi, respectively. Directive pencil beam, required for 5G backhauling communication, has been confirmed for 8×8 antenna array where the half power beam width is 1.5° for both E and H-planes while grating lobes appear at 28°.

2012 6th European Conference on Antennas and Propagation (EUCAP), 2012

2nd European Conference on Antennas and Propagation (EuCAP 2007), 2007

ABSTRACT

The exploitation of Q/V-band will boost the capacity of High-Throughput Satellites (HTS) but, on ... more The exploitation of Q/V-band will boost the capacity of High-Throughput Satellites (HTS) but, on the other side, it will prompt the adoption of innovative techniques, such as Smart Gateway Diversity (SGD) to cope with heavy propagation impairments. In this paper, feeder link operation is simulated assuming that an N+P SGD system (i.e. N active gateways and P backup gateways) is adopted to mitigate rain fades. Due to the non-negligible latency (∼30 s) involved by gateway handover, a linear predictor of rain attenuation has been designed to operate before the switching decision block. In a gateway cluster (N = 9 and P = 1) with mid-latitude gateway stations, the above SGD set-up leads to a feeder link availability of about 99.66% of time with a small degradation compared to the case in which the attenuation is exactly known (99.79%). However, the number of predicted handovers significantly increases to an average of about 1200 events per year, which may result in critically short sepa...

2020 XXXIIIrd General Assembly and Scientific Symposium of the International Union of Radio Science, 2020

Electronics, 2019

Battery-based energy storage systems are forecasted to have a rapid diffusion in the next future,... more Battery-based energy storage systems are forecasted to have a rapid diffusion in the next future, because they can support the diffusion of renewable energy sources and can offer interesting ancillary services for the distribution grid. Consequently, energy management strategies for batteries and inverters present in storage systems will play a fundamental role in order to guarantee effective energy transfer processes between storage systems and the grid. This paper proposes an efficient management strategy which allows maximizing the overall energy efficiency of grid-connected storage systems taking into account the actual relationship between the efficiency and the charging/discharging power of the storage system. The effectiveness of the strategy is as shown by analysis results, the proposed strategy can allow a remarkable efficiency increase compared with strategies which are not aimed at the efficiency optimization.

In this paper, a fast frequency sweep technique is applied to the analysis of Substrate Integrate... more In this paper, a fast frequency sweep technique is applied to the analysis of Substrate Integrated Waveguides performed with a Green’s function technique. The well-known Asymptotic Waveform Evaluation technique is used to extract the Padè approximation of the frequency response of Substrate Integrated Waveguides devices. The analysis is extended to a large frequency range by adopting the Complex Frequency Hopping algorithm. It is shown that, with this technique, CPU time can be reduced by almost one order of magnitude with respect to a point by point computation.

IEEE Access, 2019

This paper presents a new improved gain array configuration well suited for mid-range V-band back... more This paper presents a new improved gain array configuration well suited for mid-range V-band backhauling applications. The proposed solution is based on a cavity-backed shorted annular patch (SAP) antenna loaded with a parasitic patch element for gain maximization. This solution is proved by designing and measuring a 4 × 4 array which presents a reflection coefficient bandwidth covering the frequencies from 58.7 to 63.25 GHz (7.6% at 60 GHz). The experimentally validated array gain is equal to 18 dBi corresponding to 37.9% of aperture efficiency. The antenna and array configurations presented in this paper are optimized to minimize the manufacturing cost and complexity. This result is achieved through a novel beamforming network (BFN) configuration, implemented using a dual-layer substrate-integrated waveguide (SIW) technology, and partly integrated on the array aperture. The achieved results demonstrate how the performance of the cavity backed SAP array is comparable to the ones achieved with more complex and expensive solutions. INDEX TERMS 5G mobile communication, antenna arrays, substrate integrated waveguide (SIW).

IEEE Transactions on Microwave Theory and Techniques, 2019

This paper presents the first experimental assessment of a highly integrated dual-band dual-polar... more This paper presents the first experimental assessment of a highly integrated dual-band dual-polarized antenna tile designed for synthetic aperture radar (SAR) digital beamforming (DBF) satellite applications. The demonstrator described in this paper is the first comprehensive experimental validation of an RF module providing the X-band and Ka-band (9.6-and 35.75-GHz) operation with custom downconversion stages. All the antennas, transitions, and downconversion chips are integrated in the same antenna tile fabricated using a customized 15-layer high density interconnect process. The designed tile goes to the limits of the proposed technology and for the high trace density and for the size of the vertical transitions. The proposed results represent the state of the art in terms of compactness for a DBF SAR RF module even though the demonstrator was manufactured with a standard low-cost technology. The experimental assessment proves the validity of the proposed manufacturing and integration approaches showing a substantial agreement between the performance of the individual blocks and of the integrated system.

Radio Science, 2016

In this work, the design of a right-/left-handed composite transmission line implementation with ... more In this work, the design of a right-/left-handed composite transmission line implementation with passband characteristics is demonstrated on 0.13 μm silicon-germanium bipolar CMOS (SiGe BiCMOS) technology. The proposed structure is formed by a shorted coplanar waveguide transmission line loaded with split ring resonators (SRRs). As it will be shown, by controlling the geometry of the SRRs as well as their electric coupling with the host line, it is possible to achieve a balanced passband response with widespread bandwidth at millimeter wave frequencies. Besides, this paper introduces a configuration that allows to significantly lower the resonant frequency of the SRRs by loading the rings with Metal-Insulator-Metal capacitors. It will be illustrated how this approach allows to reduce the center band frequency of about 40% preserving the balanced behavior and without increasing the resonator size. Finally, the proposed design was experimentally validated with a prototype exhibiting an extended passband with a fractional bandwidth of 19.3% and À3.2 dB of insertion loss around the central frequency of 60 GHz. The use of these transmission lines can be foreseeing in high-capacity millimeter wave communication systems which require compact passband blocks integrated on chip.

IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation, 2016

A dual band, Tx/Rx, self-diplexing phased array is presented. The antenna has been designed to co... more A dual band, Tx/Rx, self-diplexing phased array is presented. The antenna has been designed to cover Tx/Rx satellite communications at K/Ka band with a frequency ratio 1.5:1. To obtain dual band operations with a single radiating surface, a novel dual band radiator is adopted and placed in a configuration in which dual band and single band elements are interleaved. The proposed configuration reduces the number of radiating elements required by other solutions while avoiding the insurgence of grating lobes. The tightly packed arrangement of the elements poses many integration issues, which are solved with a novel integration technique. The array elements are optimized to scan the beam in excess of ° in both bands. A subarray with 49 Rx elements and 105 Tx elements was built and measured confirming the results obtained in simulations.