Design of Millimeter-Wave Circularly Polarized Endfire Antenna and Multibeam Antenna Array for Wireless Applications

Abstract

A broadband stepped tapered slots’ endfire circularly polarized (CP) antenna and a multibeam antenna array are proposed for millimeter-wave (mmWave) applications. First, a modified tapered slot endfire antenna element is designed. Compared with the normal antipodal linearly tapered slot (ALTSA) endfire antenna, the performance of the stepped tapered slots’ antenna shows remarkable improvement, and the size of the antenna reduces effectively. The simulation and measurement results of the proposed endfire antenna show that an impedance bandwidth of 63.5% (75.1–145 GHz), an AR < 3 dB bandwidth of 50% (75.9–125.3 GHz), and a max gain of 8.8 dBic are realized, respectively. Second, to reduce fabrication and assembly requirements, a groove gap waveguide (GWG) feeding network is designed for multibeam array applications. The broadband 2 <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\times $ </tex-math></inline-formula> 2 GWG network, interconnections, and transitions are designed and applied in the antenna array. Finally, a multibeam array based on the proposed endfire antenna is designed, fabricated, and measured. An impedance bandwidth up to 37.7% and a wide axial ratio bandwidth of 38.7% with a max LHCP gain of 12.8 dBic are achieved by the proposed 2 <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\times $ </tex-math></inline-formula> 2 multibeam antenna array. The proposed multibeam endfire CP antenna array would be an attractive candidate for mmWave wireless applications.