Balanced dual fed SIW slot antenna array for Q-Link PAN high gain application

TLDR: In this article, a balanced dual-feeding scheme is introduced to excite each subarray from its both terminals with equal phase and amplitude to ensure the radiation pattern of the sub-array is stably steering to the normal direction over the entire operating band.

Abstract: This paper presents the design of a 16×17 slot antenna array based on SIW (Substrate Integrated Waveguide) technique with a novel balance dual-feeding scheme. The proposed SIW antenna array consists of 16 longitudinal slot sub-arrays, and each sub-array has 17 radiation slots. Balanced dual feeding scheme is introduced to excite each sub-array from its both terminals with equal phase and amplitude to ensure the radiation pattern of the sub-array is stably steering to the normal direction over the entire operating band. Two 16-way power dividers are used to unit sub-arrays in a shunt form and simultaneously ensure the balanced feeding. Another T-shaped power-divider is used to combine the two 16-way power dividers into one port. Thus, the finalized antenna array has only one port but its radiation pattern is independent to frequency. The antenna array is implemented based on standard PCB process and both CPW-SIW and rectangular waveguide-SIW transitions are designed for the measurement. The measured maximum gain of the antenna array achieves 26.9 dBi, and the measured bandwidth of -10 dB is 40.5~43.5 GHz. The proposed antenna array is promising for Q-Link PAN high gain application.