Millimeter-Wave Fully Integrated Dielectric Resonator Antenna and Its Multi-Beam Application

• Published in: IEEE transactions on antennas and propagation Vol. 70; no. 8; pp. 6571 - 6580
• Main Authors: Ma, Chaojun, Zheng, Shao Yong, Pan, Yong Mei, Chen, Zhe
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.08.2022; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Antenna arrays; Antennas; Boundaries; Cavity resonators; Configurations; Dielectric resonator antenna (DRA); Dielectric resonator antennas; Dielectrics; electromagnetic bandgap (EBG); Energy gap; Laminates; Metamaterials; Millimeter waves; millimeter-wave (MMW) antenna; multi-beam; Multibeam antennas; Periodic structures; Radio antennas; substrate-integrated gap waveguide; Substrates; Surface waves; Transmission lines; Waveguides
• ISSN: 0018-926X; 1558-2221
• DOI: 10.1109/TAP.2022.3161361

To address the issues of the inconvenient fabrication and integration for millimeter-wave (MMW) dielectric resonator antennas (DRAs), a new configuration is proposed. First, a dielectric resonator with artificial electromagnetic boundaries is implemented by introducing the electromagnetic band-gap structure along the four side-wall boundaries of a certain dielectric region on a printed circuit board. The electromagnetic bandgap (EBG) structure is constructed using a printed array of periodic upside-down mushroom-type unit cells. The resonant-mode analysis reveals that the proposed DR can support conventional dielectric resonator modes and dense dielectric patch (DDP) cavity modes simultaneously. To excite the DR, a substrate-integrated gap waveguide transmission line is embedded in the proposed structure for implementing a fully integrated DRA. For demonstration, a fully integrated dielectric resonator antenna (FIDRA) operating at 31 GHz is designed. Simulated results show that the antenna offers an 11.5% −10 dB impedance bandwidth (29.6 to 33.2 GHz), in which a peak gain of 7.85 dBi is obtained. As an extension, a multi-beam antenna array composed of a <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">1 \times 4 </tex-math></inline-formula> FIDRA antenna array and a SIGW <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">4 \times 4 </tex-math></inline-formula> Butler matrix is designed and fabricated. The experimental results verified the effectiveness of the proposed configuration in integrating the DRA and feeding network.