Abstract
This paper presents the design of a high-performance 0.45–0.50 THz antenna on chip (AoC) for fabrication on a 100-micron GaAs substrate. The antenna is based on metasurface and substrate-integrated waveguide (SIW) technologies. It is constituted from seven stacked layers consisting of copper patch–silicon oxide–feedline–silicon oxide–aluminium–GaAs–copper ground. The top layer consists of a 2 × 4 array of rectangular metallic patches with a row of subwavelength circular slots to transform the array into a metasurface. This essentially enlarges the effective aperture area of the antenna. The antenna is excited using a coplanar waveguide feedline that is sandwiched between the two silicon oxide layers below the patch layer. The proposed antenna structure reduces substrate loss and surface waves. The AoC has dimensions of 0.8 × 0.8 × 0.13 mm3. The results show that the proposed structure greatly enhances the antenna’s gain and radiation efficiency, and this is achieved without compromising its physical size. The antenna exhibits an average gain and efficiency of 6.5 dBi and 65%, respectively, which makes it a promising candidate for emerging terahertz applications.
Highlights
Smart wireless devices have grown in popularity at an exponential rate
It has been shown that THz communication can provide a Gbps data rate, we are at a nascent stage of development for data rates in the Tbps [4,5]
The aluminium surface acts like an artificial magnetic conductor (AMC) that fully reflects incident waves with a near zero degrees reflection phase [15]
Summary
Smart wireless devices have grown in popularity at an exponential rate. This has caused an explosion of data traffic in the limited prescribed bandwidth resources [1]. A low-resistivity substrate (10–20 Ω cm) is a common choice for the fabrication of CMOS circuits, which is necessity to overcome the latch-up issue This type of substrate, greatly limits the efficiency of planar antennas resulting from high ohmic and dielectric loss in the underlying silicon substrate. Proposed in this paper is a technique to overcome the limitations on bandwidth, gain, and efficiency of THz antennas fabricated on-chip. This is achieved by employing two different technologies, namely a substrate-integrated waveguide (SIW) and a 2D metamaterial, which is commonly referred to as a metasurface [14]. The results confirm this has notable improvement in the radiation characteristics of AoC
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