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

RF Product Marketing Manager for Aerospace Defense, Keysight Technologies

Nancy Friedrich is RF Product Marketing Manager for Aerospace Defense at Keysight Technologies. Nancy Friedrich started a career in engineering media about two decades ago with a stint editing copy and writing news for Electronic Design. A few years later, she began writing full time as technology editor at Wireless Systems Design. In 2005, Nancy was named editor-in-chief of Microwaves & RF, a position she held (along with other positions as group content head) until 2018. Nancy then moved to a position at UBM, where she was editor-in-chief of Design News and content director for tradeshows including DesignCon, ESC, and the Smart Manufacturing shows.