[P1-58]
Adaptive Load Impedance Matching Using 5-port Reflectometer With
Computationally Simple Measurement
Hyeong-Seok Jang #1, Won-Seok Lee #2, Tae-dong Yeo #3, Jong-Won Yu #4
#Departmentof Electrical Engineering,
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)
Guseong-Dong, Yuseong-Gu, Daejeon, 305-701, Korea
1janghs@kaist.ac.kr
Abstract—Five-port architectures are investigated as a re-
flectometer for adaptive load impedance matching. The pro-
posed reflectometer requires computationally simple control loop.
Moreover, the adaptive load impedance matching system in RFID
UHF band are proposed. Using simulation and measurement
studies, it is shown that the five-port architecture can be used as a
low-cost, simple and high-performance reflectometer in adaptive
load matching systems.
Index Terms—5-port, reflectometer, adaptive impedance
matching, impedance tuner, matching algorithm.
I. I NTRODUCTION
The presence of the human body and hand affect input
impedance, far-field radiation pattern, radiation efficiency, and
the magnitude of the near field([1]). With the continuous trend
to smaller hand-held devices with more functionality and more
wireless bands, the possible insufficient over-the-air (OTA)
performance becomes a growing concern for service providers.
To improve antenna radiation performance, antennas have
high radiation efficiency and mismatched efficiency. Therefore,
since adaptive impedance matching system seem to be the
promising solution for improving antenna impedance, many
researchers have been working on adaptive hand effect tuning
system([2]-[5]).
Adaptive impedance tuning systems have been reported
using magnitude and phase measurement, phase difference
measurement, or standing wave ratio measurement. But the
reported method have some disadvantages, as follows: Vec-
tor(magnitude and phase) measurement based on analytic com-
putation. Usually this requires a computationally expensive
control loop. Adaptation methods that use the sign of the
phase difference to tune a reactive component to zero. These
methods usually employ RF phase detectors or FosterSeeley
discriminators and can’t tune a real component to 50 ohm. op-
timization techniques have been commonly used to minimize
standing wave ratio(SWR). Different optimization approaches,
such as simplex and single step, genetic algorithm, have been
used to minimize the network input reflection coefficient as
much as possible or at least down to an acceptable level. These
optimization methods search for the right component tuning
setting through an iterative process, consuming a considerable
amount of time to reach the tuning goal. In addition, depending
on the optimizer choice and its initial settings, there is a risk
of converging into local minima.
In this work, we use a 5-port reflectometer to measure
antenna impedance with improved computation complexity.
2013 Asia-Pacific Microwave Conference Proceedings
1 Directional coupler 2
Impedance tuner ZL
Source
Γ2
Wilkinson power divider
3
4
5
Attenuator
90° hybrid coupler
Mismatch detection & Automatching algorithm
Fig. 1. Proposed adaptive load impedance matching control.
The proposed adaptive matching system, which is illustrated in
Fig. 1, consists of three blocks: a 5-port reflectometer, a control
unit and an impedance tuner. Once the reflectometer detects a
mismatched antenna impedance, it triggers the control unit
which will adjust the impedance tuner to compensate the
mismatch. In this structure, a controller tunes the matching net-
work and calculates real component and reactive component
of antenna impedance based on the measurement of the reflec-
tometer using simple computation. The measured mismatched
antenna impedance can be improved by the impedance tuner
and matching algorithm.
II. A NTENNA I MPEDANCE M EASUREMENT
In order to measure antenna impedance, The 5-port reflec-
tometer consists of a directional coupler, a Wilkinson divider,
an attenuator, a ring hybrid, three power detectors. Antenna
impedance can be calculated using the power detected by the
port3, port4, port5. The antenna impedance can be matched
by using a tuner core. It consists of one tunable capacitor in
series ( C1 ) and two tunable capacitors in shunt (C2 , C3 ). The
impedance control unit can control the total impedance of the
tuner core impedance and antenna impedance.
857 978-1-4799-1472-2/13/$31.00 ©2013 IEEE
 2013 Asia-Pacific Microwave Conference Proceedings

Start
a1 a2
Five-port Reflectometer ZL Measure imaginary part using (4)
b1 b2
P4> P5 P4< P5
Γ2 Increase C 1 δ 1 = P 4 -P 5 =0 ? Decrease C 1
a3 b3 a4 b4 a5 b5

Minimize δ 2 = |P 4 -0.5 |
P3 P4 P5

NO Matching condition? NO
Fig. 2. Block diagram of proposed 5-port reflectometer.
YES
End
Im
q5
Fig. 4. Flow chart of proposed matching algorithm.

B. Real Part measurement

Real part of reflection coefficient Γ2 can be measured when
-
Γ2 Γ2
+
Re 1
k = 2√ , Φ = 0
2

Γ2 = x + yj (3a)
1 1 1 1
P4 = ( √ + √ Γ2 )2 , P5 = ( √ − √ Γ2 )2 (3b)
|Γ|=1 2 2 2 2 2 2
q4
x = P4 − P5 (3c)

C. Imaginary Part measurement

Imaginary part of reflection coefficient Γ2 can be measured
1
Fig. 3. Graphical solution of imaginary part measurement in the (Γ) plane. when k = 2√ 2
,  Φ = −90◦
 1 j  1 j
P4 = ( √ − √ Γ2 )2 , P5 = ( √ + √ Γ2 )2 (4a)
A. 5-port reflectometer 2 2 2 2 2 2
 

The forward power P3 , the sum(Σ) port power P4 , and the y = P 4 − P5 (4b)
delta(Δ) port power P5 are extracted by 5-port structure. In From the above equations, it is noted that the proposed 5-
Fig. 2, reflected power wave each port can be expressed as port reflectometer only need 2 addition operation. For six-port
a3 a4 a5 reflectometer needs 12 multiplication, 9 addition and 2 division
Γ3 = = 0, Γ4 = = 0, Γ5 = = 0, (1a) operations. The reflection coefficient of Fig. 3 illustrates the
b3 b4 b5
−j basic operation of the proposed reflectometer.
b3 = √ (C + IT Γ2 )a1 (1b)
2
−1 1 III. M ATCHING A LGORITHM
b4 = (C + IT Γ2 )a1 − √ k  Φ(I + CT Γ2 )a1 (1c) The matching algorithm was developed for adaptive load
2 2
j −j impedance matching. From (4) and (2) perfect matching
b5 = (C + IT Γ2 )a1 + √ k  Φ(I + CT Γ2 )a1 (1d) 1
condition can be expressed as, when k = 2√ ,  Φ = −90◦
2 2 2
 
Where the letters T , I, C, k and Φ are used for convenience in δ1 = P4 − P5 = 0, y = 0 (5a)
order to indicate through, isolation, coupled, attenuation and  1
δ2 = P4 − = 0, x = 0 (5b)
phase shift, respectively. If the directional coupler is ideal, viz. 2
the directivity of the coupler is infinite(I = 0, T = 1), The Our algorithm can be written as follows:
sum(Σ) port power P4 , and the delta(Δ) port power P5 can Step 1: When it is determined that imaginary part of
be expressed as reflection coefficient Γ2 is positive(P4 > P5 ), the impedance
controller continuously increases the capacitance value of the
b4 2 1
P4 = | | = ( √ + k  Φ · Γ2 ) 2 (2a) variable capacitor C1 , and determines whether or not an
b3 2 increase/decrease in the imaginary part value is reversed(y =
b5 2 1 0). That is, on the assumption that the total impedance of
P5 = | | = ( √ − k  Φ · Γ2 )2 (2b)
b3 2 the antenna is located in the inductive region, the imagi-
nary part of reflection coefficient decreases as the impedance

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 2013 Asia-Pacific Microwave Conference Proceedings

V. C ONCLUSION
C2 L1
Five-port architectures are proposed as a reflectometer for
Γ2 adaptive load impedance matching. The proposed reflectome-
ter requires computationally simple control loop. Moreover,
experimental results show that the proposed Five-port architec-
C1 C3 L2 tures can be used as a low-cost, simple and high-performance
reflectometer in adaptive load matching systems.

Fig. 5. Tunable impedance matching Pi-network. ACKNOWLEDGMENT

This work was supported by SEMCAD X by SPEAG.
90 90
1.0

0.8
120 60
1.0

0.8
120 60 www.speag.com.
0.6 0.6
150 30 150 30
0.4 0.4

0.2 0.2
R EFERENCES
0.0 180 0 0.0 180 0

0.2 0.2
[1] C. H. Li, E. Ofli, N. Chavannes and N. Kuster, “Effects of hand
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& Propagat., vol. 57, pp. 2763–2770, Sep. 2009.
0.8 0.8 [2] F. Meng, A. van Bezooijen, and R. Mahmoudi, “A mismatch detector for
240 300 240 300
1.0
270
1.0
270 adaptive impedance matching” in Proc. 36th Eur. Microw. Conf., 2006,
a) b) pp. 1457–1460.
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90 [3] J. de Mingo, A. Valdovinos, A. Crespo, D. Navarro, and P. Garcia, “An
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RF electronically controlled impedance tuning network design and its
0.6
150 30 MCU(8051) Impedance tuner
application to an antenna input impedance automatic matching system,”
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(Tunable BST capacitors)
IEEE Trans. Microw. Theory Tech., vol. 52, pp. 489–497, Feb. 2004.
0.2 [4] Q. Gu, J. R. de Luis, A. S. Morris and J. Hilbert, “An analytical algorithm
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Antenna(QIFA)
for pi-network impedance tuners,” IEEE Trans. Circuits Syst. I, Reg.
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Reflectometer

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[5] E. L. Firrao, A. J. Annema and B. Nauta, “An automatic antenna tuning
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c) d)

Fig. 6. Measurement results of proposed algorithm with initial |Γ2 | = 0.6

a) 60◦ , b) 130◦ , c) 240◦ , d) implemented adaptive load impedance matching
system

controller increases the capacitance value of the variable

capacitor C1 . When it is determined that imaginary part of
reflection coefficient Γ2 is negative(P4 < P5 ), the impedance
controller continuously decreases the capacitance value of
the variable capacitor C1 , and determines whether or not an
increase/decrease in the Imaginary part value is reversed.
Step 2: Tunes the series and shunt capacitors C2 and C3 to
minimize δ2 for matching condition(5b).
Step 3: If total matching condition is satisfied, end the
algorithm. Otherwise return to Step 1.

IV. E XPERIMENTAL RESULT

To validate the performance of the proposed structure, The
implementation of matching algorithm in section III was car-
ried out at 915 MHz. Fig. 6 shows the implemented adaptive
load impedance matching module and measurement results for
the UHF RFID band. The tunable thin-film barium strontium
titanate (BST) capacitors C1 , C2 , C3 with 3.3:1 tunability are
8.2 pF , 5.6 pF and 6.8 pF , respectively. The series inductor
L1 = 6.8 nH and the shunt inductor L2 = 3.3 nH.The
matching condition is δ1 < 0.05, δ2 < 0.05. The mismatched
antenna reflection coefficient Γ2 is initially 0.6 60◦ , 0.6 130◦
and 0.6 240◦ , respectively.

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