Wideband High-Gain Circularly Polarized Substrate Integrated Cavity Antenna Array for Millimeter-Wave Applications

Abstract

A wideband high-gain circularly polarized (CP) substrate integrated cavity (SIC) antenna array is presented for millimeter-wave applications. The proposed antenna element is simply composed of a slot-coupled high-order-mode resonant square SIC and a pair of obliquely placed strip-shaped parasitic patches on the top surface of the SIC. The parasitic patches are used to adjust the aperture electromagnetic field distribution and phase of the two orthogonal resonant modes of TM211 and TM121 in the SIC to achieve a high-gain CP radiation and meanwhile introduce an additional cavity-backed slot-dipole CP radiation to extend axial ratio (AR) bandwidth of the proposed antenna element. By combining the above two high-gain CP radiation mechanisms, a wideband high-gain CP SIC antenna element is achieved. The simulated results of the proposed antenna element show an overlaid bandwidth of 20.36% from 26.20 to 32.14 GHz, while considering the −10 dB reflection coefficient, 3 dB AR, 3 dB gain bandwidths properties, and a maximum right-hand CP gain of 10.53 dBi at 29.40 GHz. On this basis, a wideband high-gain 8 <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> 8 CP array fed by a full-corporate substrate integrated waveguide (SIW) network is designed and fabricated. The measured results show that the proposed array has an overlaid bandwidth of 21.72% from 25.85 to 32.15 GHz and a measured gain of up to 26.10 dBic at 29.00 GHz.