Design of a Six-Port Reflectometer for a Microwave Breast Cancer Detection System

The design of a wideband microwave reflectometer for the purpose of inclusion in a breast cancer detection system is presented. In this system, a wideband frequency source is used to synthesize a narrow pulse via the stepfrequency synthesis method. The reflectometer undertakes measurements in frequency domain and the collected data is transformed into time/space domain using IFFT. In order to accomplish reflection coefficient measurements over a large frequency band, wideband couplers, dividers and square-low power detectors are required to form the six-port reflectometer. In this measurement equipment, voltages appearing at the detectors outputs can be processed with a PC equipped with precision Analogue to Digital converters. The chosen configuration of the sixport enables the display of the measured data in realtime. Its operation is studied with the use of Agilent ADS.