Fan Yang

Bio: Fan Yang is an academic researcher from Tsinghua University. The author has contributed to research in topics: Antenna (radio) & Microstrip antenna. The author has an hindex of 55, co-authored 403 publications receiving 12563 citations. Previous affiliations of Fan Yang include Tampere University of Technology & University of California.

Microstrip antennas integrated with electromagnetic band-gap (EBG) structures: a low mutual coupling design for array applications

Abstract: Utilization of electromagnetic band-gap (EBG) structures is becoming attractive in the electromagnetic and antenna community. In this paper, a mushroom-like EBG structure is analyzed using the finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method. Its band-gap feature of surface-wave suppression is demonstrated by exhibiting the near field distributions of the electromagnetic waves. The mutual coupling of microstrip antennas is parametrically investigated, including both the E and H coupling directions, different substrate thickness, and various dielectric constants. It is observed that the E-plane coupled microstrip antenna array on a thick and high permittivity substrate has a strong mutual coupling due to the pronounced surface waves. Therefore, an EBG structure is inserted between array elements to reduce the mutual coupling. This idea has been verified by both the FDTD simulations and experimental results. As a result, a significant 8 dB mutual coupling reduction is noticed from the measurements.

Wide-band E-shaped patch antennas for wireless communications

Abstract: This paper presents a novel single-patch wide-band microstrip antenna: the E-shaped patch antenna. Two parallel slots are incorporated into the patch of a microstrip antenna to expand it bandwidth. The wide-band mechanism is explored by investigating the behavior of the currents on the patch. The slot length, width, and position are optimized to achieve a wide bandwidth. The validity of the design concept is demonstrated by two examples with 21.2% and 32.3% bandwidths. Finally, a 30.3% E-shaped patch antenna, resonating at wireless communication frequencies of 1.9 and 2.4 GHz, is designed, fabricated and measured. The radiation pattern and directivity are also presented.

Reflection phase characterizations of the EBG ground plane for low profile wire antenna applications

Abstract: Mushroom-like electromagnetic band-gap (EBG) structures exhibit unique electromagnetic properties that have led to a wide range of electromagnetic device applications. This paper focuses on the reflection phase feature of EBG surfaces: when plane waves normally illuminate an EBG structure, the phase of the reflected field changes continuously from 180/spl deg/ to -180/spl deg/ versus frequency. One important application of this feature is that one can replace a conventional perfect electric conductor (PEC) ground plane with an EBG ground plane for a low profile wire antenna design. For this design, the operational frequency band of an EBG structure is defined as the frequency region within which a low profile wire antenna radiates efficiently, namely, having a good return loss and radiation patterns. The operational frequency band is the overlap of the input-match frequency band and the surface-wave frequency bandgap. It is revealed that the reflection phase curve can be used to identify the input-match frequency band inside of which a low profile wire antenna exhibits a good return loss. The surface-wave frequency bandgap of the EBG surface that helps improve radiation patterns is very close to its input-match frequency band, resulting in an effective operational frequency band. In contrast, a thin grounded slab cannot work efficiently as a ground plane for low profile wire antennas because its surface-wave frequency bandgap and input-match frequency band do not overlap. Parametric studies have been performed to obtain design guidelines for EBG ground planes. Two novel EBG ground planes with interesting electromagnetic features are also presented. The rectangular patch EBG ground plane has a polarization dependent reflection phase and the slotted patch EBG ground plane shows a compact size.

Electromagnetic Band Gap Structures in Antenna Engineering

Abstract: Preface 1. Introduction 2. FDTD Method for periodic structure analysis 3. EBG Characterizations and classifications 4. Design and optimizations of EBG structures 5. Patch antennas with EBG structures 6. Low profile wire antennas on EBG surfaces 7. Surface wave antennas Appendix: EBG literature review.

Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface-Based Wireless Communications: Antenna Design, Prototyping, and Experimental Results

Abstract: One of the key enablers of future wireless communications is constituted by massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, which can improve the spectral efficiency by orders of magnitude. In existing massive MIMO systems, however, conventional phased arrays are used for beamforming. This method results in excessive power consumption and high hardware costs. Recently, reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) has been considered as one of the revolutionary technologies to enable energy-efficient and smart wireless communications, which is a two-dimensional structure with a large number of passive elements. In this paper, we develop a new type of high-gain yet low-cost RIS that bears 256 elements. The proposed RIS combines the functions of phase shift and radiation together on an electromagnetic surface, where positive intrinsic-negative (PIN) diodes are used to realize 2-bit phase shifting for beamforming. This radical design forms the basis for the world's first wireless communication prototype using RIS having 256 two-bit elements. The prototype consists of modular hardware and flexible software that encompass the following: the hosts for parameter setting and data exchange, the universal software radio peripherals (USRPs) for baseband and radio frequency (RF) signal processing, as well as the RIS for signal transmission and reception. Our performance evaluation confirms the feasibility and efficiency of RISs in wireless communications. We show that, at 2.3 GHz, the proposed RIS can achieve a 21.7 dBi antenna gain. At the millimeter wave (mmWave) frequency, that is, 28.5 GHz, it attains a 19.1 dBi antenna gain. Furthermore, it has been shown that the RIS-based wireless communication prototype developed is capable of significantly reducing the power consumption.

I and i

Abstract: There is, I think, something ethereal about i —the square root of minus one. I remember first hearing about it at school. It seemed an odd beast at that time—an intruder hovering on the edge of reality. Usually familiarity dulls this sense of the bizarre, but in the case of i it was the reverse: over the years the sense of its surreal nature intensified. It seemed that it was impossible to write mathematics that described the real world in …

Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning

Abstract: Probability Distributions.- Linear Models for Regression.- Linear Models for Classification.- Neural Networks.- Kernel Methods.- Sparse Kernel Machines.- Graphical Models.- Mixture Models and EM.- Approximate Inference.- Sampling Methods.- Continuous Latent Variables.- Sequential Data.- Combining Models.

Photonic crystals

Abstract: The term photonic crystals appears because of the analogy between electron waves in crystals and the light waves in artificial periodic dielectric structures. During the recent years the investigation of one-, two-and three-dimensional periodic structures has attracted a widespread attention of the world optics community because of great potentiality of such structures in advanced applied optical fields. The interest in periodic structures has been stimulated by the fast development of semiconductor technology that now allows the fabrication of artificial structures, whose period is comparable with the wavelength of light in the visible and infrared ranges.

Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces for Energy Efficiency in Wireless Communication

Abstract: The adoption of a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) for downlink multi-user communication from a multi-antenna base station is investigated in this paper. We develop energy-efficient designs for both the transmit power allocation and the phase shifts of the surface reflecting elements subject to individual link budget guarantees for the mobile users. This leads to non-convex design optimization problems for which to tackle we propose two computationally affordable approaches, capitalizing on alternating maximization, gradient descent search, and sequential fractional programming. Specifically, one algorithm employs gradient descent for obtaining the RIS phase coefficients, and fractional programming for optimal transmit power allocation. Instead, the second algorithm employs sequential fractional programming for the optimization of the RIS phase shifts. In addition, a realistic power consumption model for RIS-based systems is presented, and the performance of the proposed methods is analyzed in a realistic outdoor environment. In particular, our results show that the proposed RIS-based resource allocation methods are able to provide up to 300% higher energy efficiency in comparison with the use of regular multi-antenna amplify-and-forward relaying.