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3 authors, including:
Zhi Ning Chen
Qing Xianming
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3470
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 59, NO. 9, SEPTEMBER 2011
Index Terms60 GHz, arrays, millimeter wave antennas, low temperature co-fired ceramic (LTCC), surface waves.
Fig. 2. Three LTCC aperture-coupled patch antennas with and without open
air cavity operating at 60 GHz.
I. INTRODUCTION
At millimeter-wave (mmW) frequencies, conductor loss, dielectric
loss and surface wave loss become higher and are critical to the gain
of antennas [1]. In particular, the larger electrical thickness and higher
permittivity of low temperature co-fired ceramic (LTCC) substrate used
in antenna array design at mmW result in significant losses such that
enhancing the gain of the antennas becomes much more challenging.
There have been quite a few reported methods on how to suppress
the losses, specifically caused by severe surface waves. The use of high
impedance surfaces around patch antennas has been applied in particular the uni-planar electromagnetic band-gap (UC-EBG) on a 60 GHz
LTCC array [2] but with the increased size of antenna arrays. The use
of embedded cavity to lower the effective dielectric constant has been
reported [3], [4]. However, the required extra processing increases the
complexity and price, and has a high chance of deformation. An alternative method is to partially remove the substrate surrounding the
radiating patches [5][8]. The patch antennas at 2.4 GHz on printed circuit board (PCB) could attain up to 2-dB gain enhancement [8]. However, in LTCC process, it is impossible to fully remove the substrate
surrounding the four sides of the radiating patch. Therefore, only the
substrate around the main radiating edges of the patch is removed to
effectively suppress surface wave loss.
This communication presents the method to improve gain by introducing the open air cavities around radiating edges of the patches
in the arrays conforming to the constraints of LTCC process at millimeter-wave frequencies. The effects of the open air cavities on the
performance of the patch antenna arrays operating at 60-GHz mmW
bands are numerically and experimentally investigated by comparing
with the conventional array design without open air cavities.
Manuscript received August 25, 2010; revised December 02, 2010; accepted
January 15, 2011. Date of publication July 14, 2011; date of current version
September 02, 2011. This work was supported by Terahertz Science & Technology Inter-RI Program under Grant #082 141 0040 by the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), Singapore.
The authors are with Institute for Infocomm Research, Singapore (e-mail:
sbyeap@i2r.a-star.edu.sg; chenzn@i2r.a-star.edu.sg; qingxm@i2r.a-star.edu.
sg).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this communication are available online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TAP.2011.2161549
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 59, NO. 9, SEPTEMBER 2011
3471
Fig. 4. (a) Long rectangular open air cavities in between rows of the array and
(b) shorter open air cavities positioned at the radiating edges of patch array.
Fig. 6. (a) Microstrip-to-GCPW transition, (b) stripline-to-GCPW transition,
and (c) simulated jS j and jS j of the transitions.
Fig. 5. (a) Cavity with a microstrip feed-line, (b) cavity covered by an extra
LTCC layer with a microstrip feed-line, and (c) cavity with a stripline feed-line.
3472
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 59, NO. 9, SEPTEMBER 2011
TABLE I
DIMENSION, GAIN AND BEAMWIDTH OF THE 60-GHz ANTENNA ARRAYS
IV. CONCLUSION
The technique of using open air cavity has been presented for
60-GHz LTCC antenna array designs and validated experimentally for
gain enhancement. It has been shown that the surface waves have been
suppressed in the arrays by partially removing the substrate around the
radiating edges of the patch elements. Compared with the conventional
patch antenna arrays without any open air cavity, such suppression of
the surface waves have increased the gain up to 2.8 dB over the band
of 5764 GHz. By incorporating a stripline feed, the structure is able
to provide an extra ground plane to lessen the effects of the circuit
underneath the antenna in a chip module. The use of open air cavities
to improve gain in the designs has been shown to be feasible in the
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 59, NO. 9, SEPTEMBER 2011
3473
TABLE I
PUBLISHED RESULTS FOR THE 25-ELEMENT, 50-WAVELENGTH PROBLEM
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors would like to thank J. Khoo from the Institute for Infocomm Research, Singapore, and K. Kautio, M. Lahti and K. Ronka
from VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland for their effort in the
fabrication of the antennas.
REFERENCES
[1] D. M. Pozar, Considerations for millimeter wave printed antennas,
IEEE Trans. Antennas Propag., vol. 31, no. 5, pp. 740747, Sept. 1983.
[2] A. E. I. Lamminen, A. R. Vimpari, and J. Saily, UC-EBG on LTCC for
60-GHz frequency band antenna applications, IEEE Trans. Antennas
Propag., vol. 57, no. 10, pp. 29042912, Oct. 2009.
[3] A. Panther, A. Petosa, M. G. Stubbs, and K. Kautio, A wideband array
of stacked patch antennas using embedded air cavities in LTCC, IEEE
Microw. Wireless Compon. Lett., vol. 15, no. 12, pp. 916918, Dec.
2005.
[4] A. E. I. Lamminen, J. Saily, and A. R. Vimpari, 60-GHz patch antennas and arrays on LTCC with embedded-cavity substrate, IEEE
Trans. Antennas Propag., vol. 56, no. 9, pp. 28652874, Sep. 2008.
[5] R. A. R. Solis, A. Melina, and N. Lopez, Microstrip patch encircled
by a trench, in Proc. IEEE Int. Symp. on Antennas Propag. Society,
Jul. 2000, vol. 3, pp. 16201623.
[6] Q. Chen, V. F. Fusco, M. Zheng, and P. S. Hall, Micromachined silicon antennas, in Proc. Int. Conf. on Microwave and Millimeter-Wave
Tech., Aug. 1998, pp. 289292.
[7] Q. Chen, V. F. Fusco, M. Zhen, and P. S. Hall, Trenched silicon microstrip antenna arrays with ground plane effects, in Proc. 29th Eur.
Microwave Conf., Oct. 1999, vol. 3, pp. 263266.
[8] S. B. Yeap and Z. N. Chen, Microstrip patch antennas with enhanced
gain by partial substrate removal, IEEE Trans. Antennas Propag., vol.
58, no. 9, pp. 28112816, Sept. 2010.
[9] S. B. Yeap, Z. N. Chen, A. C. W. Lu, V. Sunappan, and L. L. Wai,
60-GHz LTCC antenna array with microstrip to CPW transition, in
Proc. Asia Pacific Microwave Conf., Dec. 2009, pp. 19381941.
I. INTRODUCTION
Thinned arrays are formed from normal equally-spaced filled arrays
by deactivating a number of the elements. The aperture of the filled
array is maintained, so the width of the main beam is comparable to
that of the filled array and similar angular resolution is thus achieved.
Manuscript received October 08, 2010; revised February 06, 2011; accepted
February 09, 2011. Date of publication July 12, 2011; date of current version
September 02, 2011.
The author is with the Defence, Peace, Safety and Security (DPSS), Council
for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), Pretoria 0001, South Africa
(e-mail: wduplessis@ieee.org).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TAP.2011.2161450
However, the reduced number of active elements means that the size,
weight, cost and complexity of the antenna array, its feed network and
any signal processing are reduced [1][5].
Thinned arrays can be designed to have identical weights for all elements leading to benefits including simplified feed networks, and identical drive for power amplifiers when the array is used for transmission
[1], [6]. However, the additional degrees of freedom offered by control of
the weights of the antenna elements can lead to significant improvements
to the array parameters including the sidelobe level (SLL) [7], [8].
One of the key figures of merit of any array that utilizes weighted
element excitations is the ratio of the largest excitation magnitude to the
smallest excitation magnitudethe current taper ratio (CTR). Larger
CTRs are indicative of increased design complexity because of increased
challenges associated with issues such as realizing an appropriate feed
network and higher dynamic ranges for the transmitter and receiver
systems. Designing for a low CTR is thus desirable [1], [3], [4] with
equally-excited arrays having the lowest possible CTR of 1.
Sparse arrays are similar to thinned arrays except that the positions of
the antenna elements are not quantized. While this approach increases
design freedom, potentially leading to improved array performance,
periodic quantization of the element positions has a number of advantages. Coupling between antenna elements is essentially identical when
the element positions are quantized, simplifying the design. Quantization also means that the results are valid for all frequencies below
the design frequency because of the polynomial nature of the results.
Furthermore, no limitation is placed on the maximum scan angle of
the array when the element spacing is quantized to multiples of half a
wavelength.
These points are clearly demonstrated through the use of the example
of 25 elements in a linear aperture 50 wavelengths long. A number of
published results for this problem are summarized in Table I. The first
solution uses a cyclic difference set and represents the best value that
has been obtained without resorting to iterative numerical methods. Solutions L2 and L3 and are equally-excited arrays and represent compromises between sidelobe level (SLL) and beamwidth. Solutions L4
to L8 show that considerable SLL improvements can be achieved when
the elements are weighted at the cost of increasing the CTR. Solutions
L9 and L10 give results whose element positions are quantized twentieths of a wavelength and achieve significantly better SLL than the