Compact and Low-Profile On-Chip Antenna Using Underside Electromagnetic Coupling Mechanism for Terahertz Front-End Transceivers

Abstract

The results presented in this paper show that by employing a combination of metasurface and substrate integrated waveguide (SIW) technologies, we can realize a compact and low-profile antenna that overcomes the drawbacks of narrow-bandwidth and low-radiation properties encountered by terahertz antennas on-chip (AoC). In addition, an effective RF cross-shaped feed structure is used to excite the antenna from its underside by coupling, electromagnetically, RF energy through the multi-layered antenna structure. The feed mechanism facilitates integration with the integrated circuits. The proposed antenna is constructed from five stacked layers, comprising metal–silicon–metal–silicon–metal. The dimensions of the AoC are 1 × 1 × 0.265 mm3. The AoC is shown to have an impedance match, radiation gain and efficiency of ≤ −15 dB, 8.5 dBi and 67.5%, respectively, over a frequency range of 0.20–0.22 THz. The results show that the proposed AoC design is viable for terahertz front-end applications.

A Review on Metamaterial Application in Microstrip and Substrate Integrated Waveguide Antenna Designs

“…Another example of performance improvement of the on-chip antenna has been found in [91]. Similar to the previously reported works [88][89][90], the combination of metamaterial and SIW has been in effect for enhancing the on-chip antenna's performance. The layouts of reference on-chip antenna and metamaterial-inspired on-chip antenna have been presented respectively in Figures 31(a Furthermore, the application of metamaterial has been found in designing phased array antenna [92].…”

“…A literature survey on on-chip antennas based on metamaterial, metasurface, and SIW has been carried out in [87]. The designs of metamaterial-inspired SIW based on-chip antennas have been presented in [88][89][90][91]. Very small size of the antenna in THz frequency limits the bandwidth, gain, and efficiency of the antenna.…”

“…As discussed earlier, the demerits of the on-chip antenna are low impedance bandwidth and radiation efficiency, which have resulted from the small aperture size of the antenna and surface wave excitations. Similar to [88], the combination of metasurface and SIW has been proposed in [89] to overcome these limitations. The antenna has been realized with the five stacked layers of metal-silicon-metal-silicon-metal.…”

Compact low‐profile metasurface antenna via non‐uniform fractional meta‐cells with an e ‐TM 30 mode for Wi‐Fi applications

“…The antenna design embodiment is similar to various reported literatures. 3,6,[33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44] The antenna is designed in commercial finite element method CAD solver Ansys HFSS software. The S11-parameter plot is shown in Figure 4A, operating from (5.3-5.7) GHz of 7.27% 10-dB impedance bandwidth with f 0 = 5.5 GHz.…”

6G and beyond: Investigation of broadband terahertz interdigitated photoconductive antenna by exploiting laser parameters

“…5,6 However, the unavailability of an efficient terahertz sources and detectors restrict the advancements of terahertz. Researchers have tried to generate coherent THz radiation using electronic, optic and electro-optic methods, [7][8][9][10][11][12] however, among those, the photoconductive antenna (PCA), in presence of ultrafast laser illumination, can overcome the limitations in other electronic and optical THz generation techniques. 13 PCAs, works based on the photoconduction principle, operate at room temperature, can be used as both the THz emitter and detector, and can be easily integrated with RF/MW and optical techniques.…”