Wideband Low-Profile Connected Rectangular Ring Dielectric Resonator Antenna Array for Millimeter-Wave Applications

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A wideband low-profile connected rectangular ring dielectric resonator (DR) antenna (DRA) array is presented for millimeter-wave (mmWave) applications. It consists of four rectangular ring DRA elements. The DRA elements are excited by microstrip feedlines through four slots on the ground plane. A slot mode, the DRA <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${\mathrm {TE}}^{\text {y}}_{1\delta 1}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> mode, and the perturbed <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${\mathrm {TE}}^{\text {y}}_{3\delta 1}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> mode are simultaneously excited, giving a wideband design. To avoid the alignment problem, the DRAs are connected to their adjacent elements through dielectric arms. It is found that the position of the dielectric arms has significant effects on the antenna performance. To demonstrate the idea, a prototype with a dielectric constant of 20.8 was designed, fabricated, and tested for licensed mmWave bands (24.25–29.5 GHz). A reasonable agreement between the measured and simulated results is observed. The measured 10 dB impedance bandwidth ( <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\vert \text{S}_{11}\vert \le - 10$ </tex-math></inline-formula> dB) is 31.6% (22.52–30.97 GHz), with a measured boresight realized gain being higher than 8 dBi from 22.5 to 30 GHz. The measured mutual couplings between the DRA elements of the array are lower than −20 dB in the operating frequency range. Furthermore, our prototype has a low profile of <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$0.074~\lambda _{0}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> , where <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\lambda _{0}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> is the wavelength in air at the center frequency.