Design and development of a Ku-band transmitter for satellite communication applications.

摘要

To satisfy the significant worldwide demand for higher data rates and broadband transmission, applications of satellite communication systems in the Ku/Ka-band range are expanding due to its large available bandwidth. However, there is still a deficiency of economical high-frequency components for low-cost home transceivers. The current drawbacks of most commercially available transceivers are their relatively large size, heavy weight, and separately located modules. The implementation of a compact transmitter module is a key issue for reduction in cost, size and system complexity. One obstacle for a compact transceiver module is the large and heavy cavity filter that cannot be easily integrated into the module. In this paper, we present for the first time a functional compact LTCC-based transmitter module featuring an integrated filter and MMIC chipsets utilizing a low-cost commercial TriQuint's TQTRX 0.6 μm GaAs MESFET process with a f_t of 20 GHz and a f _max of 30 GHz. Most of the LTCC-based modules demonstrated so far were dedicated for phased-array applications. The feasibility of implementing a LTCC integrated filter has been demonstrated in for L-band application. The same concept is now extended for Ku-band applications. We show that a functional low cost Ku-band satellite module can be implemented using commercial GaAs and LTCC processes despite some major challenges, considering the design frequency is very close to the f_t of the device technology as well as the loss and bandwidth requirement of the filter.