This article presents a new electronic device – the four-port quasi-circulating quadrature hybrid (QCQH), which combines desirable features of electronic circulators and quadrature hybrids. The QCQH comprises three quarter-wavelength transmission lines and a 90° non-reciprocal phase shifter (NRPS) and is suitable for inband full duplex applications. We derive the four-port S-parameter matrix of the QCQH and the transfer functions under termination scenarios of interest. The resulting closed-form expressions are compared with the prior art electronic circulator. A 90° transmission line and lumped transformer alternatives are considered for designing a QCQH based on a two-port N-path circuit. TX isolation and transmission expressions are derived and verified against simulations, and a new wideband leakage cancellation approach is proposed. A TSMC 65 nm CMOS N-path chip is integrated on-board with a discrete, lumped, LCL transformer implementation. TX-to-antenna insertion loss of 1.4 dB and an RX NF of 4.7 dB at the frequency of 1 GHz were measured with a primary passive TX-RX isolation of 21 dB. Total isolation of more than 50 dB for an 80 MHz OFDM WiFi TX signal employing digitally equalized active leakage cancellation was achieved along with better than −40 dB TX EVM with SIC ON.

Single Carrier FDMA (SC-FDMA) plays an important role in modern wireless communications as an alternative to OFDM mainly since it exhibits low peak-to-average power ratio. Accordingly, SC-FDMA is employed as the uplink scheme for the 3GPP long term evolution (LTE). In the presence of multipath, the SC-FDMA signal may arrive at the receiver perturbed by inter-symbol-interference, which renders the single-tap frequency-domain equalization suboptimal. Optimum maximum likelihood detection for SC-FDMA is often prohibitively complex, and hence useful mostly as a performance bound for suboptimal detection schemes. In this work, the optimum-detector performance is analyzed in detail; the analysis can be easily applied to any SC frequency-domain equalization scheme. Closed form bounds on the achievable bit error rate are provided for low and high SNR regimes in correlated and uncorrelated Rayleigh fading channels. The bounds reveal that the diversity order at high SNR is significantly smaller than in the low SNR regime. Moreover, error rate flaring behavior is demonstrated under optimum detection of SC-FDMA. The analytical results are verified by simulations.

The mounting evidence, that cellular radiation may adversely affect the health of its users, results in growing concern among the general public. This concern only grows as cellular technologies become an essential part of modern life (mobile e-mail, social networking, etc.). Radiating antennas in the proximity of the user, such as antennas of mobile phones are of special interest for this matter. In this paper we study the performance of a recently proposed architecture for wireless networks, aiming at minimal emission from mobile stations, without any additional radiation sources. The new architecture, dubbed Green Cellular, abandons the classical transceiver base station design and suggests the augmentation of transceiver base stations with receive only devices. These devices, dubbed Green Antennas, are not aiming at coverage extension but rather at minimizing the emission from mobile stations. We employ indoor and outdoor propagation simulation tools and field experiments to study the expected impact of the Green Cellular architecture on emission from mobile stations. Our results reveal a significant, up to 50dB, decrease in emission power and respective exposure to radiation.