The enormous growth of wireless data traffic in recent years has made the millimeter-wave (mm-wave) technology as a good fit for high-speed communication systems. Extensive works are continuing from the device to system, to the radio architecture, to the network to support the communication in mm-wave frequency ranges. To support this extensive high data rate, beam forming is found to be the key-enabling technology. Hence, an array antenna design is an extremely important issue. The beam-forming arrays are chosen to achieve the desired link capacity considering the high path loss and atmospheric loss at mm-wave frequencies and also to increase the coverage of the mm-wave communication system. There are diverse design challenges of the array due to the small size, use of large numbers of antennas in close vicinity, integration with radio-frequency (RF) front ends, hardware constraints, and so on. This paper focuses on the evolution and development of mm-wave array antenna and its implementation for wireless communication and numerous other related areas. The scope of the discussion is extended on the reported works in every sphere of mm-wave antenna array design, including the selection of antenna elements, array configurations, feed mechanism, integration with front-end circuitry to understand the effects on system performance, and the underlying reason of it. The new design aspects and research directions are unfolded as a result of this discussion.INDEX TERMS Mm-wave communication, antenna array design, array configuration, feed mechanism, RF circuit. SASWATI GHOSH received the Ph.D. degree from IIT Kharagpur, India, where she is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with G. S. Sanyal School of Telecommunications. She is involved in active research in the area of antenna design for 60-GHz communication, RF energy harvesting, EMI/EMC measurements and EMI sensors, estimation of EMC of high-frequency electronic systems, and EMI/EMC/ESD on spacecraft bodies. She has 15 international journal publications, three book chapters, and more than 60 publications, including national journals and national/international conference proceedings. She serves as a Reviewer for several international journals. She had received the Young Scientist Fellowship twice and the Women Scientist Fellowship from the Department of Science and Technology, Government of India. DEBARATI SEN received the Ph.D. degree in telecommunication engineering from IIT Kharagpur, Kharagpur, India, where she is currently an Assistant Professor. Her research interests include wireless and optical communication systems, mostly on MB-OFDM, synchronization, equalization, UWB, BAN, green communications, 60-GHz communications, and baseband algorithm design for coherent optical communications.
