A mm-Wave Patch Antenna with Broad Bandwidth and a Wide Angular Range

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel mm-wave microstrip patch antenna with broad bandwidth and wide angular coverage, suitable for planar array integration, verified through measurements and simulations.

Contribution

It introduces a new design with slotted resonances and parasitic patches achieving broad bandwidth and wide beamwidth on a low-cost substrate.

Findings

Bandwidth of 13.1% between 34.1 GHz and 38.9 GHz

Half power beamwidth between 100° and 125° within bandwidth

Measured results agree well with simulations

Abstract

A novel mm-wave microstrip-fed patch antenna with broad bandwidth and wide angular coverage suitable for integration in planar arrays is designed, analyzed and verified by measurements. The antenna provides a bandwidth of 13.1% between 34.1 GHz and 38.9 GHz, which is achieved by a slotted multiple resonances microstrip patch and a matching circuit in microstrip technology. The antenna is built on RO3003 substrate with top and ground layers, which is low cost compared to other techniques. For simple integration with microstrip and frontend circuits, the feeding happens in the top layer with a microstrip coupling gap feed. The wide half power beamwidth is achieved by suitably designed parasitic patches for the first resonant mode. The second resonant mode has a wide half power beamwidth by default. The half power beamwidth is between 100{\deg} and 125{\deg} within the matched bandwidth, which is a very good value for a microstrip patch antenna radiating over a ground plane. The measured input impedance and radiation characteristic show very good agreement with simulation results.