A Wideband On-Antenna Power Combining Magnetoelectric Dipole with Gain Enhancement

This article introduces a novel magnetoelectric (ME) dipole antenna for wideband on-Antenna power combining (OAPC) with the enhanced gain. The proposed OAPC antenna design employs two shaped probes to simultaneously excite the ME dipole with common-mode signals, facilitating power combining directly on the ME dipole. The proposed OAPC ME dipole enables wideband power combining while eliminating power combiners required in conventional on-circuit power combining (OCPC) approaches, achieving both lower insertion loss and more compact integration. The proposed OAPC ME dipole overcomes the bandwidth limitations in previous OAPC works. Furthermore, the mechanism behind the inherent gain degradation of the conventional ME dipole is elucidated. Leveraging the distributed feeding structure of the OAPC design, the high-frequency (HF) gain degradation of the ME dipole is overcome, resulting in a gain enhancement. The HF-enhanced gain effectively compensates for the inherent gain roll-off observed in wideband power amplifiers (PAs) as the operating frequency increases. The measured results show a 3.5-dB EIRP improvement in the proposed OAPC ME dipole over the single-port design, validating the efficient and near-lossless OAPC capability. Leveraging the HF gain enhancement of the passive OAPC ME dipole, the active implementation achieves a remarkable EIRP improvement up to 9.8 dB.