Antenna-on-chip and antenna-in-package solutions to highly-integrated millimeter-wave devices for wireless communications. IEEE Transactions

The recent advances in 60-GHz radios have called for the parallel development of compact and efficient millimeter-wave antennas. This brief addresses for the first time the design, fabrication, and characterization of on-chip inverted-F and quasi-Yagi antennas for 60-GHz radios. The design was made using the Zeland IE3D software package. The fabrication was realized with the back-end-of-line process of silicon substrates of low resistivity 10 cm. The characterization was conducted on wafer with Cascade Microtech coplanar probes and an HP8510XF network analyzer. The results show that the inverted-F antenna achieved a minimum return loss of 32 dB and a gain of 19 dBi at 61 GHz; while the quasi-Yagi antenna achieved a minimum return loss of 6.75 dB and a gain of 12 5 dBi at 65 GHz. Good agreement has been observed between the measured and simulated results.

Radio signal propagation in a tunnel exhibits distinct near and far regions with quite different propagation characteristics. This paper proposes a model that can distinguish these propagation regions and predict their respective propagation losses in the tunnel. The model relies on a break point to separate the propagation regions and a hybrid technique to calculate the propagation losses. The location of the break point is determined with the solution of a novel tunnel-propagation equation for the first time. The solution shows that the location of the break point depends strongly upon frequency, antenna position, and tunnel transversal dimensions. The model is compared with data measured in various tunnels at different frequencies (900 MHz, 1.8 GHz, and 2.448 GHz). The results show reasonable agreement between predictions and measurements.

Theory and analysis of differentially-driven microstrip antennas

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