Abstract
For mobile THz applications, integrated beam steering THz transmitters are essential. Beam steering approaches using leaky-wave antennas (LWAs) are attractive in that regard since they do not require complex feeding control circuits and beam steering is simply accomplished by sweeping the operating frequency. To date, only a few THz LWAs have been reported. These LWAs are based on polymer or graphene substrates and thus, it is quite impossible to monolithically integrate these antennas with state-of-the-art indium phosphide (InP)-based photonic or electronic THz sources and receivers. Therefore, in this article, we report on an InP-based THz LWA for the first time. The developed and fabricated THz LWA consists of a periodic leaking microstrip line integrated with a grounded coplanar waveguide to microstrip line (GCPW-MSL) transition for future integration with InP-based photodiodes. For fabrication, a substrate-transfer process using silicon as carrier substrate for a 50-μm thin InP THz antenna chip has been established. By changing the operating frequency from 230 to 330 GHz, the fabricated antenna allows to sweep the beam direction quasi-linearly from −46° to 42°, i.e., the total scanning angle is 88°. The measured average realized gain and 3-dB beam width of a 1.5-mm wide InP LWA are ∼11 dBi and 10°. This article furthermore discusses the use of the fabricated LWA for THz interconnects.
Highlights
T ERAHERTZ (THz) waves feature distinct advantages compared to its neighboring spectra, making this frequency spectrum (0.1–10 THz) very attractive for several applications.Manuscript received July 11, 2020; revised September 23, 2020; accepted October 26, 2020
A microstrip periodic leaky-wave antennas (LWAs) based on polymer substrate fed by a vector network analyzer (VNA) is shown in [28]. The disadvantage of these approaches is that the developed LWAs could not be monolithically integrated with state-of-the-art chip-sized photonic or electronic THz sources and receivers, which are typically based upon indium phosphide (InP) substrate
We report on an InP-based THz beam steering LWA
Summary
T ERAHERTZ (THz) waves feature distinct advantages compared to its neighboring spectra, making this frequency spectrum (0.1–10 THz) very attractive for several applications. THz LWAs are envisaged to be an attractive solution for applications such as THz interconnects which necessitate robust and highly integrated THz beam steering antennas This in turn requires that the THz LWA can be integrated with state-of-the-art photonic or electronic sources and receivers. The disadvantage of these approaches is that the developed LWAs could not be monolithically integrated with state-of-the-art chip-sized photonic or electronic THz sources and receivers, which are typically based upon indium phosphide (InP) substrate This is to enable the use of mature 1.55 μm IR laser diodes, modulators, and amplifiers and for electronics, this is because InP transistors offer the highest maximum oscillation frequencies and transit frequencies [29], [30]. The design of the fabricated InP THz LWA studied in this work is motivated by future integration with InP THz photodiodes to realize monolithically integrated robust beam steering THz transmitter chips.
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