Millimeter-Wave Fully Integrated Dielectric Resonator Antenna and Its Multi-Beam Application

TLDR: In this paper , a dielectric resonator with artificial electromagnetic boundaries is implemented by introducing the electromagnetic band-gap structure along the four side-wall boundaries of a certain dielectrics region on a printed circuit board.

Abstract: To address the issues of the inconvenient fabrication and integration for millimeter-wave (MMW) dielectric resonator antennas (DRAs), a new configuration is proposed. First, a dielectric resonator with artificial electromagnetic boundaries is implemented by introducing the electromagnetic band-gap structure along the four side-wall boundaries of a certain dielectric region on a printed circuit board. The electromagnetic bandgap (EBG) structure is constructed using a printed array of periodic upside-down mushroom-type unit cells. The resonant-mode analysis reveals that the proposed DR can support conventional dielectric resonator modes and dense dielectric patch (DDP) cavity modes simultaneously. To excite the DR, a substrate-integrated gap waveguide transmission line is embedded in the proposed structure for implementing a fully integrated DRA. For demonstration, a fully integrated dielectric resonator antenna (FIDRA) operating at 31 GHz is designed. Simulated results show that the antenna offers an 11.5% −10 dB impedance bandwidth (29.6 to 33.2 GHz), in which a peak gain of 7.85 dBi is obtained. As an extension, a multi-beam antenna array composed of a <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$1 \times 4$ </tex-math></inline-formula> FIDRA antenna array and a SIGW <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$4 \times 4$ </tex-math></inline-formula> Butler matrix is designed and fabricated. The experimental results verified the effectiveness of the proposed configuration in integrating the DRA and feeding network.