Dual Polarized Planar Aperture Antenna on LTCC for 60-GHz Antenna-in-Package Applications

Abstract

This paper presents a novel dual polarized planar aperture antenna using the low-temperature cofired ceramics technology to realize a novel antenna-in-package for a 60-GHz CMOS differential transceiver chip. Planar aperture antenna technology ensures high gain and wide bandwidth. Differential feeding is adopted to be compatible with the chip. Dual polarization makes the antenna function as a pair of single polarized antennas but occupies much less area. The antenna is ±45° dual polarized, and each polarization acts as either a transmitting (TX) or receiving (RX) antenna. This improves the signal-to-noise ratio of the wireless channel in a point-to-point communication, because the TX/RX polarization of one antenna is naturally copolarized with the RX/TX polarization of the other antenna. A prototype of the proposed antenna is designed, fabricated, and measured, whose size is 12 mm $\times $ 12 mm $\times1.128$ mm ( $2.4\lambda _{0}\times 2.4\lambda _{0}\times 0.226\lambda _{0}$ ). The measurement shows that the −10 dB impedance bandwidth covers the entire 60 GHz unlicensed band (57–64 GHz) for both polarizations. Within the bandwidth, the isolation between the ports of the two polarizations is better than 26 dB, and the gain is higher than 10 dBi with a peak of around 12 dBi for both polarizations.