Cavity-backed Patch Antenna Array Research Articles

Circularly Polarized Elliptical Cavity-Backed Patch Antenna Array for Millimeter-Wave Applications

This work introduces cost-effective solution for a millimeter-wave (mmW) antenna array development. We suggest an elliptical cavity-backed patch antenna array to achieve a wideband and high-gain circularly polarized (CP) at mmW frequencies. The whole array only uses two PCBs and a metallic fixture to build. We introduce a new configurable subarray with <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$2\times $ </tex-math></inline-formula> 1 radiating elements that are formed by two partially overlapped elliptical cavities to generate the radiation together with the driven patches of the subarray. The subarray can produce a wide impedance bandwidth of 37%, a wide 3 dB axial ratio (AR) bandwidth of 29.6%, and a maximum gain of 11.6 dBic. Based on the result from the subarray, we design a 32-element antenna array by a <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$4 \times $ </tex-math></inline-formula> 4 antenna array configuration. The power distribution is realized by a 1-to-16 full-corporate feed network. The measured results show that the proposed CP array obtains an impedance bandwidth of 31.5% and a 3 dB AR bandwidth of 24%. In addition, the gain of the array is from 19.1 to 21 dBic within the 3 dB AR bandwidth. With wide impedance and AR bandwidths, the proposed antenna array can find potential applications in long-range mmW communications.

Monolithically Integrated Corporate-Fed Cavity-Backed Antennas

A Ka-band monolithically integrated 4 × 1 corporate-fed cavity-backed patch antenna array is demonstrated in this paper. A single antenna element has four slits introduced to extend the bandwidth to about 8%. Its gain and radiation efficiency are 6.3 dBi and 97%, respectively. A rectangular ?-coaxial line based combining network is monolithically integrated with radiating elements in a slightly modified tile configuration. Specifically, to reduce the array footprint power dividers are aligned along the array axis. Combining network has height 1/2 that of the array and feed lines do not route through the antenna elements. Overall loss of the combining network is 0.5 dB at 30 GHz. Measured reflection coefficient bandwidth and maximum gain of the fabricated 4 × 1 corporate-fed array are 13.7% and 12.73 dBi, respectively. The array is designed and fabricated in a recently developed surface micromachining process known as PolyStrata.