MMIC-Based Quadrature Hybrid Quasi-Circulators for Simultaneous Transmit and Receive

This paper presents a new type of monolithic microwave integrated circuit (MMIC)-based active quasi-circulator using phase cancellation and combination techniques for simultaneous transmit and receive (STAR) phased-array applications. The device consists of a passive core of three quadrature hybrids and active components to provide active quasi-circulation operation. The core of three quadrature hybrids can be implemented using Lange couplers. The device is capable of high isolation performance, high-frequency operation, broadband performance, and improvement of the noise figure (NF) at the receive port by suppressing transmit noise. For passive quasi-circulation operation, the device can achieve 35-dB isolation between the transmit and receive port with 2.6-GHz bandwidth (BW) and insertion loss of 4.5 dB at X-band. For active quasi-operation, the device is shown to have 2.3-GHz BW of 30-dB isolation with 1.5-dB transmit-to-antenna gain and 4.7-dB antenna-to-receive insertion loss, while the NF at the receive port is approximately 5.5 dB. The device is capable of a power stress test up to 34 dBm at the output ports at 10.5 GHz. For operation with typical 25-dB isolation, the device is capable of operation up to 5.6-GHz BW at X-band. The device is also shown to be operable up to W -band by simulation with ~15-GHz BW of 20-dB isolation. The proposed architecture is suitable for MMIC integration and system-on-chip applications.