Custom-Designed Electrically Small Huygens Dipole Antennas Achieve Efficient, Directive Emissions Into Air When Mounted on a High Permittivity Block

Abstract

System-on-Chip (SoC) applications include embedded systems and mobile computing platforms. They will play major roles in fifth generation (5G) wireless systems, notably with the many associated IoT (internet-of-things) devices. Their wireless functions are enabled, for example, by on-chip antennas (OCAs), i.e., the system elements that connect them to devices in their external environments. These antennas generally reside on a high permittivity dielectric, such as silicon, which unfortunately causes most of their emitted power to be directed into the dielectric rather than into free space. This feature is quite detrimental, i.e., it leads to a severe degradation of an OCA's radiation efficiency as a transmitter of information to an external receiver and similarly to its poor performance as a receiver since little of its pattern resides in free space, severely limiting its ability to capture power from an external transmitter. Similar issues exist for sensors and communication devices residing on a human body. While many integrated antenna styles have been developed in attempts to deal with these issues, their complexities and remaining inefficiencies remain a bottleneck to their widespread adoption. It is demonstrated analytically and numerically that Huygens radiating systems provide a unique solution to these high permittivity substrate problems. Custom-designed electrically small Huygens dipole antennas that lie on the interface between air and a high permittivity block are reported that efficiently emit the majority of their radiated power into the air region rather than into the dielectric. INDEX TERMS Directivity, electrically small antennas, Huygens dipole antennas, on-body antennas, onchip antennas.

Numerical analysis of Huygens-like on-chip antennas for mm-wave applications

“…The result of over 90% Huygens source into-the-air radiation from [4] is the solution for the infinite current sheets on the border of two infinite homogeneous dielectrics. In this model, the Green's functions inside those dielectrics are of the form G ∝ e −kz|z−z0| 2jk z .…”

“…A Huygens source is a theoretical point source consisting of a point electric and an orthogonal point magnetic dipole that are scaled such as to cancel the back-radiation (in the far field). When placed at the interface between air and silicon, the electric dipole will mostly radiate into silicon (≈ 97% of the power), whereas the magnetic dipole and Huygens source radiate more then 75% and 90% into air correspondingly [4]. Although this is true for an interface between two infinite homogeneous regions, the question remains whether the situation is similar for thin grounded substrates that are commonly used in silicon production.…”

Metamaterial-inspired Near-Field Resonant Parasitic Dipole Antennas on High Permittivity Dielectrics

“…Further and much more expansive details of this work can be found in [11] which was submitted, accepted and published during the EuCAP paper review process.…”

A Wideband Dual-Polarized Endfire Antenna Array for 5G mm-Wave Smartphones

“…The incorporation of simple parasitic dipole has a significant benefit to improve bandwidth, but there is also a drawback that the radiation pattern of HP tilts to +y direction at high frequencies. This is mainly because of the asymmetric structure where the radiated power by the dipole antenna are more directed into the thick substrate [36], [37].…”