Design of an inter-injection-locked oscillator array

Abstract

In recent years, research on quasi optical or spatial power combining techniques becomes more and more attractive due to the burgeon of wireless communications, such as telecommunication, satellite communication and radar systems, which trends to operate at higher frequency bands due to the exponentially increasing demands on bandwidth and high data rate. Due to the physical limitations of semiconductor devices, power from many devices should be combined together to meet the system requirements. However, as a matter of fact, the loss of any transmission structures at such frequency bands is really a serious issue and limits the use of conventional incorporating power combining approaches such as Wilkinson power combiner, which compels the advent of new power combining methods. And one of them is the quasi optical or spatial power combining techniques, which conducts the combining in a low-loss medium, air namely, employing active integrated antennas as its unit elements. In this project, active antennas arrays of oscillator type is designed, fabricated and tested using the concept of spatial power combining techniques. And it shows that the combining efficiency of such structure is very high and thus suits for high frequency combining. Furthermore, the combining array provides a natural structure for beam controlling applications with frequency control circuitries added, which becomes a hot research area since 1980s. And such applications are also investigated in this project.