Addressing 5G and MIMO Design with Circuit/Antenna In-Situ Simulations with AWR Software
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It should be noted that the simulation techniques described in this paper do not depend on a specific EM simulator, since
third-party simulated or measured S-parameter data can be used to represent the antenna response. The corporate feed
network is shown in Figure 2. Each element is driven by a MMIC amplifier, and controlled by a phase shifter and attenuator.
Figure 2: Corporate feed network for the patch array
The power is input from the right side. Wilkinson dividers are used to split the signal and feed the 16 patches. Figure 3 shows
the feed for a typical patch. The transmit module and Wilkinson divider are shown in detail on the right side of Figure 3 and
the inside of the transmit module on the left side. Each transmit module has a phase shifter, attenuator, and MMIC amplifier
chip. The beam is steered by setting the phase and attenuation going into the MMIC amplifier and then sending the resulting
signal to the patch. The phase and attenuation are controlled by variables in the software, which can be tuned and optimized
as desired. In this manner, the beam can be scanned.
Figure 3: A transmit module and Wilkinson divider (left) and the inside of the transmit module (right)
