Title:  Millimeter-Wave VSWR Resilient Sensors for Beamforming Applications

Committee: 

Dr. Wang, Advisor

Dr. Romberg, Chair

Dr. Raychowdhhury

Abstract: The objective of the proposed research is to investigate and validate RF/mm-Wave sensor architectures which can support power sensing and impedance sensing under varying antenna loading conditions. 5G communication is becoming essential to support the growing need for Gb/s data rates over its large available frequency spectrum. Unfortunately, the path loss increases as a function of frequency, requiring phased arrays to compensate. However, the antenna elements couple with one another, which causes the impedance presented to the electronics to deviate from the ideal 50Ω terminations in which they were designed for. This issue compromises both the array’s radiation pattern, as well as the electronics’ performance in both linearity and efficiency. Reconfigurable amplifiers can compensate for this impedance mismatch, but they require VSWR resilient power/impedance sensors to perform their self-healing algorithms. This proposal focuses on the design of VSWR-resilient mm-Wave joint impedance/true-power sensors which can be integrated with power amplifiers to enable real-world deployment of reconfigurable amplifiers under these VSWR environments.