RESEARCH
MILLIMETER WAVE ANTENNAS AND CIRCUITS
W-Band On-Chip Antennas
Design and implementation of straight, L-shaped and T-shaped W-band on-chip strip dipole antennas integrated with a LC balun circuit are presented. The on-chip antennas and the balun circuit are realized by using IHP’s 0.25 µm SiGe BiCMOS technology with a localized back-side etch (LBE) module to decrease substrate loss.
Air Coplanar Probe Effect
It has been observed that measurements are highly influenced by the antenna placements and the ACP probe. The ACP probe couple with the DUT due to the radiation from its tip and causes to uncertainty in the measured results. Thus, a software calibration is performed similar to a network analyzer calibration to model the effect of ACP probe, and then the antenna reflection coefficient is calculated using the modeled probe-fed antenna.
4-Element Radar Receiver Front-End
A low cost 77 GHz 4-element phased-array radar receiver front-end module is designed and manufactured using PCB patch antennas to get rid of on-chip antennas surface wave and achieve better array gain. The receiver package is implemented by integrating active phase shifter chips on a single layer Rogers 3003 PCB board using ball-to-wedge bonding with insertion loss less than 7.5 dB at 77 GHz; this loss is compensated by the gain of chips’ LNA.
