This paper presents 300-GHz step-profiled corrugated horn antennas, aiming at their integration in low-temperature co-fired ceramic (LTCC) packages. Using substrate integrated waveguide technology, the cavity inside the multi-layer LTCC substrate and a surrounding via fence are used to form a feeding hollow waveguide and horn structure. Owing to the vertical configuration, we were able to design the corrugations and stepped profile of horn antennas to approximate smooth metallic surface. To verify the design experimentally, the LTCC waveguides and horn antennas were fabricated with an LTCC multi-layer process. The LTCC waveguide exhibits insertion loss of 0.6 dB/mm, and the LTCC horn antenna exhibits 18-dBi peak gain and 100-GHz bandwidth with more than 10-dB return loss. The size of the horn antenna is only , which makes it easy to integrate it in LTCC transceiver modules.Index Terms-Dielectric substrates, horn antennas, low-temperature co-fired ceramics (LTCC), terahertz (THz).
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.