Three-Dimensional Architecture of Substrate Integrated Waveguide Feeder for Fermi Tapered Slot Antenna Array Applications

Abstract

A class of three-dimensional planar arrays in substrate integrated waveguide (SIW) technology is proposed, designed and demonstrated with 8 16 elements at 35 GHz for millimeter-wave imaging radar system applications. Endfire element is generally chosen to ensure initial high gain and broadband characteristics for the array. Fermi-TSA (tapered slot antenna) structure is used as element to reduce the beamwidth. Corrugation is introduced to reduce the resulting antenna physical width without degradation of performance. The achieved measured gain in our demonstration is about 18.4 dBi. A taper shaped air gap in the center is created to reduce the coupling between two adjacent elements. An SIW H-to-E-plane vertical interconnect is proposed in this three-dimensional architecture and optimized to connect eight 1 16 planar array sheets to the 1 8 final network. The overall architecture is exclusively fabricated by the conventional PCB process. Thus, the developed SIW feeder leads to a significant reduction in both weight and cost, compared to the metallic waveguide-based counterpart. A complete antenna structure is designed and fabricated. The planar array ensures a gain of 27 dBi with low SLL of 26 dB and beamwidth as narrow as 5.15 degrees in the E-plane and 6.20 degrees in the 45 -plane.Index Terms-E-plane corner, sidelobe level (SLL), substrate integrated waveguide (SIW), tapered slot antenna (TSA).

Substrate integrated waveguide antenna subarray for broadband circularly polarised radiation

“…A 1/16 H ‐plane parallel power divider is designed to produce a low sidelobe level with amplitude distribution across the array aperture [19]. Eight 1 × 8 are inserted at the end of the 16 branches thanks to H ‐to‐ E plan corner.…”

Radiation characteristics of terahertz waveguide‐fed circularly polarised antipodal exponentially tapered slot antenna

“…However, these waveguide‐fed micromachined THz antennas almost all exhibit linear polarisation, instead of circular polarisation. The antipodal tapered slot antenna (ATSA), that is well known and widely applied at the millimetre‐wave (MMW) band [7, 8], has been designed with feeding waveguide and tested at the THz band [6].…”

Broadband Feed for Low Cross-Polarization Uniplanar Tapered Slot Antennas on Low-Permittivity Substrate

“…For this purpose, a TSA system is usually mounted within an array setup, e.g. [2][3][4][5]. Mounting TSA systems in an array puts certain limits on the dimensions of the single TSA.…”