A Passive STAR Microwave Circuit for 1-3 GHz Self-Interference Cancellation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a passive, wideband STAR microwave circuit that enables full-duplex radio operation using a dummy antenna and COTS components, achieving high isolation without complex switching.

Contribution

A novel passive linear microwave circuit for STAR operation using a dummy antenna inside an RF chamber, eliminating the need for traditional circulators and switching circuits.

Findings

Tx/Rx isolation of 25-60 dB across 1-3 GHz

High linearity and noise-free operation

Virtually unlimited bandwidth limited by COTS components

Abstract

Simultaneous transmit and receive (STAR) allows full-duplex operation of a radio, which leads to doubled capacity for a given bandwidth. A circulator with high-isolation between transmit and receive ports, and low-loss from the antenna to receive port is typically required for achieving STAR. Conventional circulators do not offer wideband performance. Although wideband circulators have been proposed using parametric, switched delay-line/capacitor, and N-path filter techniques using custom integrated circuits, these magnet-free devices have non-linearity, noise, aliasing, and switching noise injection issues. In this paper, a STAR front-end based on passive linear microwave circuit is proposed. Here, a dummy antenna located inside a miniature RF-silent absorption chamber allows circulator-free STAR using simple COTS components. The proposed approach is highly-linear, free from noise, does not require switching or parametric modulation circuits, and has virtually unlimited bandwidth only set by the performance of COTS passive microwave components. The trade-off is relatively large size of the miniature RF-shielded chamber, making this suitable for base-station side applications. Preliminary results show the measured performance of Tx/Rx isolation between 25-60 dB in the 1.0-3.0 GHz range, and 50-60 dB for the 2.4-2.7 GHz range.