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Dielectric Waveguides Feed Millimeter-Wave Antennas

Jan. 23, 2008

FOR RECEIVER AND TRANSMITTER front ends in the millimeter-wave range to be widely used, certain problems must be resolved. An example is the connection of a miniature millimeterwave, monolithic integrated-circuit chip to an external antenna. To address this issue, Andreas Patrovsky and Ke Wu from the Poly-Grames Research Center at Ecole Polytechnique (Montreal, Quebec, Canada) developed a linear-array antenna fed by substrate integrated image guide (SIIG) at 94 GHz.

The resulting design provides a wide tuning range for the radiation coefficient and superior linear polarization purity. In addition, a reflection-compensation technique reduces the overall return loss while permitting frequency scanning through broadside direction without suffering from a stop band due to distributed Bragg reflection. The 2-cm-long implementation produced a fan beam with 11 dB of gain. See "Substrate Integrated Image Guide Array Antenna for the Upper Millimeter-Wave Spectrum," IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation, Nov. 2007, p. 2994.

About the Author

Nancy Friedrich | Editor-in-Chief

Nancy Friedrich began her career in technical publishing in 1998. After a stint with sister publication Electronic Design as Chief Copy Editor, Nancy worked as Managing Editor of Embedded Systems Development. She then became a Technology Editor at Wireless Systems Design, an offshoot of Microwaves & RF. Nancy has called the microwave space “home” since 2005.