Information Communication and Technology (ICT) accounts for an increasing share of global Green House Gas (GHG) emissions. Wireless circuits and systems are indispensable in across all ICT sectors, from cellular networks through satellite communications, to the Internet of Things (IoT). While Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is an industry-standard methodology for assessing the environmental impact of systems, there has been no comprehensive LCA study focusing on RF systems. We present the first comparative LCA specific to RF and microwave applications, and a design-for-sustainability guide covering mainstream RF applications. With Integrated Circuits (ICs) having the largest environmental impact, the trends in RFICs and MMICs are summarized and evaluated from an environmental perspective. Moving to mmWave frequencies, beyond 20 GHz, results in a shift to over 50% smaller node size above 28 GHz, but with minimal reduction in the core chip area, which inevitably increases the environmental footprint of 5G/6G mmWave systems. We then review active and passive microwave circuits focusing on phased array elements and filters, both distributed and lumped. A bespoke model for RF PCBs is also presented to model the surface finish and transmission line or antenna area accurately. Our LCA indicates that design choices such as the CMOS process, PCB material and surface finish, can have a large environmental impact at the manufacturing stage. We highlight the importance of low-loss components, comparing microstrip and LC filters, where a higher end-to-end RF system efficiency directly translates to a lower global warming potential (GWP), reducing Scope 2 GHG emissions.

While research in passive flexible circuits for Wireless Power Transfer (WPT) such as coils and resonators continues to advance, limitations in their power handling and low efficiency have hindered the realization of efficient all-printed high-power wearable WPT receivers. Here, we propose a screen-printed textile-based 6.78 MHz resonant inductive WPT system using planar inductors with concealed metal-insulator-metal (MIM) tuning capacitors. A printed voltage doubler rectifier based on Silicon Carbide (SiC) diodes is designed and integrated with the coils, showing a power conversion efficiency of 80-90% for inputs between 2 and 40 W. Compared to prior wearable WPT receivers, it offers an order of magnitude improvement in power handling along with higher efficiency (approaching 60%), while using all-printed passives and a compact rectifier. The coils exhibit a simulated Specific Absorption Rate (SAR) under 0.4 W/kg for 25 W received power, and under 21◦C increase in the coils’ temperature for a 15 W DC output. We finally demonstrate a wirelessly-powered textilebased carbon-silver Joule heater, capable of reaching up to 60◦C at 2 cm separation from the transmitter, as a potential wearable application which can only be wireless-powered using the proposed system.

With the massive growth in wireless systems and the internet of things vision, low-cost and rapid antenna measurements in echoic lab environments have attracted significant research, commercial, and educational interest in the last decade. In this paper, we present a low-cost antenna positioning system based on open-source positioning hardware, for in-situ 3-dimensional radiation pattern measurements. The positioner is an off-the-shelf Arduino robotic arm and can perform azimuth and elevation measurements over a hemisphere using different rotation mechanisms. The positioning system is used in conjunction with a commercial Vector Network Analyzer (VNA) and wire λ/2 antennas for the second VNA port. The measured radiation patterns of a flexible microstrip patch antenna using the proposed setup are compared to 3D full-wave simulations as well as anechoic chamber measurements. The measurement setup, excluding the VNA, costs less than $300, and does not require calibrated reference antennas, rotary connectors, or specific PC peripherals. The open-source design library is publicly available at git.soton.ac.uk/mahm1m19/antennameasurement_system/.

Owing to the shorter wavelength in the millimeter-wave (mmWave) spectrum, miniaturized antennas can receive power with a higher efficiency than UHF bands, promising sustainable mmWave-powered Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Nevertheless, the performance of a mmWave power receiver has not been compared, numerically or experimentally, to its sub-6 GHz counterpart. In this paper, the performance of mmWave-powered receivers is evaluated based on a novel wearable textile-based higher-order mode microstrip antenna, showing the benefits of wireless power transmission (WPT). Firstly, a broadband antenna is proposed maintaining a stable wearable measured bandwidth from 24.9 to 31.1 GHz, over three-fold improvement compared to a conventional patch. The proposed antenna has a measured 8.2 dBi co-polarized gain with the highest thickness-normalized efficiency of a wearable antenna. When evaluated for compact power receivers, the measured path gain shows that WPT at 26 GHz outperforms 2.4 GHz by 11 dB. A rectenna array based on the proposed antenna is then evaluated analytically showing the potential for up to 6.3x higher power reception compared to a UHF patch, based on the proposed antenna’s gain and an empirical path-loss model. Both use cases demonstrate that mmWave-powered rectennas are suitable for area-constrained and large-area wearable IoT applications.

Microwave microfluidic sensors are typically designed with a channel in vicinity of a resonator’s fringing electric (E)-fields, to characterize the material properties of a single fluid. This paper leverages hybrid 3D and dispenser printing to realize a scalable microfluidic sensor utilizing the parallel-plate capacitance of an open-ended microstrip stub, enabling, for the first time, a tunable sensitivity. A stub-loaded microstrip line is then proposed for characterizing multiple microfluidic samples simultaneously using a simple two-port multi-band resonator. The physical constrains which limit the scalability of the proposed sensors have been analyzed analytically and numerically, prior to implementing a three-channel triple-band sensor. The microfluidic channels have been fabricated using stereolithography 3D printing with the microstrip line directly dispenser printed on a conformable polyimide substrate. To accommodate varying channel thicknesses, a tapered microstrip line is proposed to maintain the impedance matching. The fabricated sensor is characterized using binary water-IPA mixtures to evaluate its sensitivity, comparing favorably with reported 3D-printed sensors. The proposed sensor achieves over 90% accuracy in determining the real permittivity following a simple water-based calibration across the different channels, for samples with 16 oC temperature sensitivity across all channels.

Owing to the mobility of a wearable antenna and the unpredictable body-centric communications environment, dual-polarization antennas are essential for both communications and energy harvesting. This paper presents a dual-polarized four-port textile antenna/rectenna for wearable simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) applications. The proposed antenna utilizes dual ports for both off-body communication and energy harvesting from horizontal and vertical polarizations. The antenna maintains a 100 MHz bandwidth with an S11 under -10 dB around 2.4 GHz in the presence and absence of the human body, and at least 10~dB small-signal and large-signal isolation between all ports. The antenna maintains a 70-88% measured total efficiency and 8.4–9.6 dBi gain for various on-phantom positions across both communication ports. The measured mutual coupling is under -10 dB between co-polarized rectenna/antenna ports, and under -16~dB between orthogonally-polarized ports. A high RF to DC peak power conversion efficiency of over 70% (+-5%) is achieved with a broadside harvesting pattern. Based on the proposed antenna’s performance, SWIPT microstrip antennas can be adopted for both full-duplex and MIMO applications, significantly reducing the complexity of future battery-free networks for both wearable and non-wearable applications.

Remote ice detection has emerged as an application of Radio Frequency (RF) sensors. While antenna-based “RFID” sensing can detect various measurands, antenna-based sensors are not currently designed based on a systematic methodology, and in most cases may have a low sensitivity requiring specialist hardware or broadband interrogation signals, incompatible with spectrum regulations. Here, we develop a systematic methodology for designing an antenna-based sensor, applicable to measurands inducing a dielectric change in the near-field of the antenna. The proposed methodology is applied to designing printable antennas as highly-sensitive sensors for detecting and measuring the thickness of ice, demonstrating best-in-class sensory response compared to more complex antenna designs. Antenna design is investigated systematically for wireless interrogation in the 2.4 GHz band, where it is found that a loop antenna outperforms a dipole owing to its more distributed capacitance. The antenna’s realized gain was identified as the optimum parameter-under-test, with “positive” sensing proposed as a method of improving linearity and immunity to interference. The developed loop antenna sensor exhibits resilience to interference and applicability to different real-world deployment environments, demonstrated through over 80% average ice thickness measurement accuracy and at least 5 dB real-time sensitivity to ice deposition.

Owing to its low relative permittivity, very few microwave sensors have been developed for monitoring ice deposition. This paper presents the first use of UHF RFID tags for wireless RF ice sensing applications. Despite its low permittivity, the existence of ice as a superstrate on a planar ultra-thin dipole antenna can lower the resonance frequency of the antenna significantly. The RFID tags, having a measured unloaded range of 9.4 m, were evaluated for remotely detecting the formation of ice in various scenarios and up to 10~m from the reader, as well as monitoring the ice thawing, based on the Relative Signal Strength (RSS) in a phase-free approach. Unlike conventional RSS-based sensing approaches where the tag’s read-range is reduced as the RSS decreases in response to the stimulant, the ice superstrate improves the impedance matching of the tags, maintaining a 10 m loaded read-range with over 12 dB ice-sensitivity, in an echoic multi-path environment. The long range and high sensitivity show that UHF RFID is a promising method of detecting and monitoring ice formation and thawing in future smart cities.