2. Y. Kobayashi and K.

Kubo, Canonical bandpass lters using dual-mode dielectric resonators, 1987 IEEE MTT-S Int Microwave Symp Dig, pp. 137 140. 3. K.A. Zaki, C. Chen, and A.E. Atia, Canonical and longitudinal dual-mode dielectric resonator lters without iris, IEEE Trans Microwave Theory Tech MTT-35 1987., 1130 1135. 4. J.-F. Liang, X.-P. Liang, C. Wang, K.A. Zaki and A.E. Atia, Dual-mode dielectric or air-lled rectangular waveguide lters, IEEE Trans Microwave Theory Tech 42 1994., 1330 1336. 5. J.R. Montejo-Garai and J. Zapata, Full-wave design and realization of multicoupled dual-mode circular waveguide lters, IEEE Trans Microwave Theory Tech 43 1995., 1290 1297. 6. F. Arndt, R. Beyer, J.M. Reiter, T. Sieverding, and T. Wolf, Automated design of waveguide components using hybrid modematchingrnumerical EM building-blocks in optimization-oriented CAD frameworks State-of-the-art and recent advances, IEEE Trans Microwave Theory Tech 45 1997., 747 759. 7. D. Baillargeat, S. Verdeyme, M. Aubourg, and P. Guillon, CAD applying the nite-element method for dielectric-resonator lters, IEEE Trans Microwave Theory Tech 46 1998., 10 17. 8. A.R. Weily and A.S. Mohan, Full two-port analysis of coaxial probe fed TE 01 and HE 11 mode dielectric resonator lters using FDTD, Microwave Opt Technol Lett 18 1998., 149 154. 9. A.R. Weily and A.S. Mohan, Design and wideband spurious performance prediction for a mixed resonator comblinerTE 01 mode DR lter using FDTD, Microwave Opt Technol Lett 23 1999. 266 273. 10. A.R. Weily and A.S. Mohan, Mode-chart calculation for dielectric- and conductor-loaded resonators using modal extraction and FDTD, Microwave Opt Technol Lett 21 1999., 405 411. 11. A.E. Atia and A.E. Williams, Narrow-band multiple-coupled cavity synthesis, IEEE Trans Circuits Syst CAS-21 1974., 649 655. 12. J. Ritter and F. Arndt, Efcient FDTDrmatrix-pencil method for the full-wave scattering parameter analysis of waveguiding structures, IEEE Trans Microwave Theory Tech 44 1996., 2450 2456. 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Key words: microstrip antenna array; antenna-combining solar cells; satellite antenna; SSFIP; amorphous silicon solar cells INTRODUCTION

Autonomous communications systems normally use separate solar cells and antennas, which compete for the use of the limited surfaces available. A combination of them can save valuable real estate, provided that antennas and solar cells are compatible. A way to do this is to combine the two kinds of devices on the same element w1x. In particular, solar panels form a large part of communications satellites, providing large at surfaces over which antennas can be mounted or printed see, for instance, w2x.. Printed antennas, commonly used in microwave communications, are naturally suited for this combination, in particular when their radiating patches can be isolated from the feed circuits w3x. The selected technology for the solar cells is amorphous silicon cells on polymer substrate, developed at the University of Neuchatel, Switzerland w4x. This choice provides exible and inexpensive designs which can be adapted to the shape of the antenna. The combination also could be of interest for terrestrial systems.
THE SOLAR ANTENNA CONCEPT SOLANT

COMBINATION OF ANTENNAS AND SOLAR CELLS FOR SATELLITE COMMUNICATIONS

S. Vaccaro,1 P. Torres, 2 J. R. Mosig,1 A. Shah,2 1 A. K. Skrivervik,1 J.-F. Zurcher, P. de Maagt,3 and L. Gerlach3 1 Laboratoire dElectromagnetisme et dAcoustique LEMA (EPFL) Ecole Polytechnique Federale CH-1015 Lausanne, Switzerland 2 Institute of Microtechnique IMT University of Neuchatel CH-2000 Neuchatel, Switzerland 3 ESTEC, European Space Agency NL-2201 Noordwijk, The Netherlands Recei ed 16 October 2000 ABSTRACT: A new principle of antenna-combining amorphous silicon solar cells and printed patches is presented. The antenna is designed, taking into account the solar cells that pro ide power to an MMIC amplier. A 2 = 4 antenna array is presented, working at a frequency of 3.76 GHz with a bandwidth of 16% and a gain of 13 dBi (passi e) and up to 30 dBi (acti e). The a Si:H solar cells supply 5 V and 100 mW at AM1.5. 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Microwave Opt Technol Lett 29: 11 16, 2001.
Contract grant sponsor: European Space Agency Contract grant number: AOr 1-3308 r 97 r NL r NB

The rst reported attempt to combine solar cells with printed antennas merely placed commercial solar cells next to a patch antenna w1x. The present approach presents a more advanced concept, in which specically designed solar cells are intimately combined with printed antennas, providing a new device called SOLANT. To obtain antennas and solar cells allowing a perfect and optimized combination, it was necessary to work on both domains during all of the phases of development. In this paper, a patch printed in a multilayered substrate has been selected as candidate antenna. The SOLANT concept allows solar cells to be incorporated into the nal structure under the form of thin additional layers or stacked patches. This has been made possible thanks to two breakthroughs: the use of innovative thin lm solar cells, and their inclusion in the electromagnetic design to achieve a compact and optimized structure.
THE SOLAR CELLS

For the solar cell technology, innovative amorphous silicon a Si:H. solar cells developed by the University of Neuchatel have been selected w4x. These cells appear as thin, light, exible lms that can be cut to t complex patch or array shapes and, eventually, conformed to curved surfaces. Figure 1 shows a cross section of the solar cell structure. A polyimide substrate is covered by an aluminum layer back contact. and by a ZnO layer which prevents aluminum diffusion. The two aforementioned layers also form a mirror. The actual solar cell is made of three silicon layers: a thin highconductivity phosphor doped n-layer about 10y5 Srcm., an intrinsic undoped. layer with a low defect density, and a highly conductive 10y6 Srcm., very thin p-layer. Most photons are absorbed in the intrinsic layer, while the doped layers are responsible for the build up of an electric eld within the solar cell. The collector layer on top of the cell must be both transparent and conductive, and hence it is made of transparent conductive oxides TCOs. either indium tin oxide or zinc oxide. Since even the best TCO has

MICROWAVE AND OPTICAL TECHNOLOGY LETTERS / Vol. 29, No. 1, April 5 2001

11

Furthermore, our in-house developed simulator allows us to use different values for Z s on different parts of the same conductive sheet. This provides a specic treatment of the possible different situations: patch alone, cells alone, and overlapping patch and cells. The value to be used for Z s is a technological issue, and a measuring campaign has been undertaken to determine it.
Figure 1 Cut-out of an amorphous solar cell, showing the different layers thickness not to scale. SOLANT PROTOTYPES

ohmic losses, a nger pattern is deposited on top, made of a Cr layer for adhesion, covered by a thicker Ag layer. Overall, the cell thickness is less than 5 m, to which must be added the currently used 50- m-thick polyimide substrate. Although showing a lower efciency 5 10%. than GaAs solar cells, which are currently used in space applications, a Si:H cells give the best wattrkilogram ratio due to their low weight. Moreover, they are inexpensive, and some preliminary tests show promising hardness against cosmic radiation.
MODELING OF SOLANT

The mathematical modeling of a printed antenna closely combined with a solar cell realized in amorphous silicon technology is by no means an easy task. The method currently used for printed antennas in our case, a mixed potential integral-equation formulation solved with the method of moments w5x. must be conveniently modied to include the effect of the cells. Although both structures are essentially planar and formed by successive stratied layers, they have two very different size scales: typical overall thicknesses are between 0.1 and 20 mm for antennas, and between 0.1 and 60 m for amorphous solar cells see Fig. 2.. Therefore, it was very soon obvious that, from the antenna RF. point of view, the cell could be modeled as a zero thickness sheet, with average effective. conductive properties to be dened. Thus, a simulation program has been developed that basically replaces the boundary condition of a perfect conductor n= E TOTAL s 0 by an impedance boundary condition, namely, n = E TOTAL s ZS JS .

Several prototypes of SOLANT have been realized, and the most advanced are described here. The rst step was the realization of an elementary block that could be easily replicated to achieve larger arrays with different congurations. This block, depicted in Figure 3a. is a 2 = 1 array with three solar cell strips. Combining these blocks, a larger 4 = 2 array integrating an MMIC amplier on its back side was realized wFig. 3b.x. The two prototypes make use of the strip-slot-foaminverted-patch SSFIP. antenna principle w3x, in which radiating patches are excited through slots. Figure 4 depicts a transverse cut of the 2 = 1 array, and the details of the several horizontal sections at different vertical levels A, B, C, and D. The dc connecting lines of the solar cells are printed on the top side of a thin epoxy dielectric where the solar cell strips are glued on A.. The cells are connected to the dc lines with small bronze beryllium ribbons. The radiating patches are printed on the bottom side of the same epoxy. The slots are etched in the ground plane of the SSFIP antenna, and their form was optimized to obtain the best matching with the maximum bandwidth C .. The last layer contains the distribution network for the feed of the array elements D .. For all prototypes, Wilkinson power dividers were used to split the RF signal to supply the different elements. The main difference between the 2 = 1 and the 4 = 2 prototypes, besides the size of the array, is the width of the dc lines connecting the solar cells. These lines were very wide in the 2 = 1 array to decrease the ohmic losses. The rst measurements have shown that the lines are not a critical element in the losses of the dc part of SOLANT, and moreover, they may introduce parasitic resonances. For this reason, much thinner dc lines were used in the 4 = 2 array to reduce

Figure 2 Comparison, in scale, of the thickness of the antenna and the solar cells. If either of the structures is layered, it is of a different scale

12

MICROWAVE AND OPTICAL TECHNOLOGY LETTERS / Vol. 29, No. 1, April 5 2001

measurements include the input impedance S11 ., the neareld distribution w6x, and the far-eld patterns. To master the rather delicate assembling process of SOLANT, a measurement protocol was developed to verify both the antenna and the solar cells after every stage of assembling. The measurement sequence is the following. 1. Measurements of the elements, antenna, and solar cells separately. 2. Measurements of the antenna and cells mounted, but not dc connected. 3. Measurements of the nal device fully assembled. Among the large amount of measurements performed, only the most representative are reported here, namely, the measurements of the separated elements and the measurements of the fully assembled device. The main characteristics of the SOLANT 4 = 2 array are

substrate 1: Ultralam 2000, r s 2.485, h s 0.76 mm substrate 2: Epoxy Perstorp FR4, r s 4.4, h s 0.1 mm nine solar cell strips delivering an overall power of 252 mW at 4 V terrestrial illumination..

Figure 3 a. Elementary subarray of SOLANT. b. SOLANT 4 = 2 array wColor gure can be viewed in the online issue, which is available at www.interscience.wiley.com.x

all of the possible interactions between the dc part and the RF part of SOLANT. Nevertheless, some parasitic resonance may appear in the dc lines of both prototypes, but fortunately, they do not affect the radiating characteristics of SOLANT. In the nal 4 = 2 array, an MMIC amplier placed on the input feed line was integrated, providing a 20 dB gain on the received signal. The core of the amplier is a Hewlett-Packard 1.5 8 GHz low-noise GaAs MMIC amplier MGA 86576. Since the solar cells provide variable voltage depending on the light intensity, a voltage stabilizer that supplies a constant 5 V voltage to the MMIC amplier was also used. In this way, the gain of the amplier is independent of the light intensity.
4 = 2 ELEMENT SOLAR ANTENNA AT 4 GHz (SOLANT 4 = 2)

As an example, we will describe, now, in detail the 4 = 2 element SOLANT wFig. 3b.x which was designed to work at 4 GHz C-band.. This frequency was chosen because it yields tractable sizes for both antenna and solar cells, and it is a frequency used for satellite communications. The microwave

The exact dimensions of each antenna element are the same of the elementary block, reported in Figure 4. Figures 5 and 6 show, respectively, the measured return loss for the antenna without and with solar cells. Since each element of the antenna was optimized to work with solar cells, the best performances are obtained for this conguration. The antenna reaches its best matching at 3.95 GHz, and has a bandwidth of 15% 600 MHz.. A near-eld scanning of the Ex component of the electric eld w6x was performed at different frequencies. Here, we show and discuss the scans at a central frequency of 4 GHz. The near-eld scan of the antenna alone Fig. 7. shows that unexpected radiated power may arise from parasitic resonances in the dc lines. Indeed, it can be seen that the region between two soldering posts is a very signicant source of radiation, exhibiting radiating levels even higher than the patches. This phenomenon could be a drawback, menacing to deteriorate the performances gain q cross polarization. of the antenna. Fortunately, it disappears when the solar cells are connected. The near-eld scan with cells connected Fig. 8. shows the eight patches radiating through the edges parallel to the Y-axis. Here, the parasitic resonance has disappeared, and the antenna radiates properly. The radiation patterns and gain have also been measured. Figure 9a. and b. shows, respectively, the XZ- and YZ-plane patterns for the antenna without cells at a frequency of 4 GHz. The patterns are symmetrical, and have a beamwidth of 20 in the XZ-plane and 30 in the YZ-plane. The level of the sidelobes is quite high because no special beamforming was tried. Indeed, each radiating element is fed with the same phase and amplitude. The measured gain at 4 GHz is 13.5 dBi. Figure 10a. and 10b. shows the same XZ- and YZ-plane patterns, but now for the antenna with cells mounted and dc connected. at a frequency of 4 GHz. The presence of the solar cells has no relevant effects on the shape of the radiation patterns, which are symmetrical and still have a beamwidth of 20 in the XZ-plane and 30 in the YZ-plane. The measured gain is 12.38 dBi at 4 GHz.

MICROWAVE AND OPTICAL TECHNOLOGY LETTERS / Vol. 29, No. 1, April 5 2001

13

Figure 4

Cut-out thickness not to scale. and dimensions of the subarray

Figure 5

SOLANT 4 = 2 return loss S11 . as a function of frequency; antenna without cells

14

MICROWAVE AND OPTICAL TECHNOLOGY LETTERS / Vol. 29, No. 1, April 5 2001

Figure 6

SOLANT 4 = 2 return loss S11 . as a function of frequency; antenna with cells dc connected

Figure 7

Near-eld scan E x at 3.95 GHz of SOLANT 4 without cells. Clear white. means maximum value of E x

Figure 8

Near-eld scan E x at 3.95 GHz SOLANT 4 with cells connected. Clear white. means maximum value of E x

MICROWAVE AND OPTICAL TECHNOLOGY LETTERS / Vol. 29, No. 1, April 5 2001

15

All of the solar cells have been measured after gluing them onto the antenna and connecting the cells are connected, but measured separately.. The solar module has been measured under nonstandard conditions. The open-circuit tension Voc was 6.755 V, the short-circuit current Isc s 98 mArcm2 , and at the maximum power point conditions, the cells deliver 63 mA at 4 V 252 mW..
CONCLUSIONS

This paper has introduced a new concept of a solar antenna, the so-called SOLANT device. The prototypes formed by a printed antenna array combined with a Si solar cells exhibit very good characteristics and excellent performances, thus demonstrating the validity of the concept. The technology to realize such designs is currently mastered. The power already provided by the solar cells that can be incorporated into a small subarray is enough to feed a signal amplier. Work is in progress to achieve an even deeper level of integration between the dc and RF parts of the device. Also, the accuracy of the computer simulation should be improved, in particular, through a better estimation of the complex permittivity of a Si:H solar cells at microwave frequencies.
REFERENCES 1. M. Tanaka, Y. Suzuki, K. Araki and R. Suzuki, Microstrip antennas with solar cells for microsatellites, Electron Lett 31 1996., 263 266. 2. B. Pattan, Satellite-based cellular communications, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1997. 3. J.-F. Zurcher and F.E. Gardiol, Broadband patch antennas, Artech House, Norwood, MA, 1995. 4. P. Pernet, M. Goetz, X. Niquille, D. Fischer, and A. Shah, Front contact and series connection problems of a SI:H solar cells on polymer lm substrates, Proc 2nd World Conf Photovoltaic Energy Conversion, Vienna, Austria, July 1998, vol. I, pp. 976 979. 5. J.R. Mosig, Integral equation technique, Numerical techniques for microwave and millimeter wave passive structures, T. Itoh Editor., Wiley, New York, 1989, chap. 3, pp. 133 214. 6. J.-F Zurcher, A near eld measurement method applied to planar structures, Microwave Eng Europe JunerJuly 1992., 43 51. 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Figure 9 Co- and cross-polarization far-eld pattern at 3.95 GHz of SOLANT 4 without solar cells. a. XZ-cutting plane. b. YZ-cutting plane

RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN LINEAR LIGHT INCIDENCE AND CIRCULAR LIGHT INCIDENCE IN SINGLE-MODE OPTICAL FIBERS
Ji Min-Ning1 1 Laser Research Institute Kun Ming University of Science and Technology Yunnan 650051, P.R. China Recei ed 23 October 2000
2 2 ABSTRACT: A fundamental relation Sm i n q S "s 1 between output light polarization magnitudes with linear light incidence and circular light incidence is found to exist uni ersally in single-mode optical bers. It is conrmed theoretically and experimentally, and is employed to analyze the SOP-maintaining capability of a ber. 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Microwave Opt Technol Lett 29: 16 19, 2001.

Figure 10 Co- and cross-polarization far-eld pattern at 3.95 GHz of SOLANT 4 with solar cells. a. XZ-cutting plane. b. YZ-cutting plane

Key words: optical ber; light incidence; single-mode ber

16

MICROWAVE AND OPTICAL TECHNOLOGY LETTERS / Vol. 29, No. 1, April 5 2001