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Gain-enhanced 60-GHz LTCC antenna array

with open air cavities
Article in IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation September 2011
Impact Factor: 2.18 DOI: 10.1109/TAP.2011.2161549

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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 59, NO. 9, SEPTEMBER 2011

Gain-Enhanced 60-GHz LTCC Antenna Array With Open

Air Cavities
Siew Bee Yeap, Zhi Ning Chen, and Xianming Qing

AbstractThe gain of low temperature co-fired ceramic (LTCC) patch

antenna arrays operating at 60 GHz is enhanced by introducing open
air cavities around their radiating patches. The open air cavities reduce
the losses caused by severe surface waves and dielectric substrate at
millimeter-wave (mmW) bands. The arrays are excited through either a
microstrip-line or stripline feed network with a grounded coplanar-waveguide (GCPW) transition. The GCPW transition is designed so that the
antenna can be measured with the patch array facing free space therefore
reducing the effect of the probe station on the measurement. The proposed
antenna arrays with the open air cavities achieves gain enhancement of
12 dB compared to the conventional antenna array without any open air
10
cavity across the impedance bandwidth of about 7 GHz for
dB at 60-GHz band.

Fig. 1. Conventional aperture-coupled patch antenna.

Index Terms60 GHz, arrays, millimeter wave antennas, low temperature co-fired ceramic (LTCC), surface waves.
Fig. 2. Three LTCC aperture-coupled patch antennas with and without open
air cavity operating at 60 GHz.

I. INTRODUCTION
At millimeter-wave (mmW) frequencies, conductor loss, dielectric
loss and surface wave loss become higher and are critical to the gain
of antennas [1]. In particular, the larger electrical thickness and higher
permittivity of low temperature co-fired ceramic (LTCC) substrate used
in antenna array design at mmW result in significant losses such that
enhancing the gain of the antennas becomes much more challenging.
There have been quite a few reported methods on how to suppress
the losses, specifically caused by severe surface waves. The use of high
impedance surfaces around patch antennas has been applied in particular the uni-planar electromagnetic band-gap (UC-EBG) on a 60 GHz
LTCC array [2] but with the increased size of antenna arrays. The use
of embedded cavity to lower the effective dielectric constant has been
reported [3], [4]. However, the required extra processing increases the
complexity and price, and has a high chance of deformation. An alternative method is to partially remove the substrate surrounding the
radiating patches [5][8]. The patch antennas at 2.4 GHz on printed circuit board (PCB) could attain up to 2-dB gain enhancement [8]. However, in LTCC process, it is impossible to fully remove the substrate
surrounding the four sides of the radiating patch. Therefore, only the
substrate around the main radiating edges of the patch is removed to
effectively suppress surface wave loss.
This communication presents the method to improve gain by introducing the open air cavities around radiating edges of the patches
in the arrays conforming to the constraints of LTCC process at millimeter-wave frequencies. The effects of the open air cavities on the
performance of the patch antenna arrays operating at 60-GHz mmW
bands are numerically and experimentally investigated by comparing
with the conventional array design without open air cavities.
Manuscript received August 25, 2010; revised December 02, 2010; accepted
January 15, 2011. Date of publication July 14, 2011; date of current version
September 02, 2011. This work was supported by Terahertz Science & Technology Inter-RI Program under Grant #082 141 0040 by the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), Singapore.
The authors are with Institute for Infocomm Research, Singapore (e-mail:
sbyeap@i2r.a-star.edu.sg; chenzn@i2r.a-star.edu.sg; qingxm@i2r.a-star.edu.
sg).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this communication are available online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TAP.2011.2161549

II. 60-GHz PATCH ANTENNA ARRAY WITH AND WITHOUT OPEN

AIR CAVITIES
A. 60-GHz Single Patch Elements With and Without Open Air Cavity
A conventional aperture-coupled patch antenna is shown in Fig. 1.
The substrate used is LTCC Ferro A6-M with "r = 5:9 and tan  =
0:001. The antenna has dimensions of l = 4 mm, w = 4 mm, h1 =
0:38608 mm (4 LTCC layers), and h2 = 0:09652 mm (1 LTCC layer)
with a 50-
microstrip feed of width wm = 0:15 mm.
For comparison studies, the patch with substrate removal around its
four sides and the patch with substrate removal only around its two radiating sides are considered. Fig. 2 shows the designs, namely the conventional patch (Design A) without any open air cavity, the patch with
surrounding open air cavity (Design B), and the patch with open air
cavity only at both sides of the radiating edges (Design C). All studies
were carried out by simulation using CST Microwave Studio. Design
B was included for comparison purposes only even though it is not realizable with the LTCC process.
Fig. 3(a) shows the simulated impedance matching of the three designs. The impedance bandwidth of Design A is 17.7% while Design
C is 7.1% for jS11 j  010 dB. The abrupt change in the dielectric at
the patch edges for Design B and C results in higher concentration of
field directly under the patch. This increases the Q factor and hence the
bandwidth for Design B and C becomes narrower. However, the gain
of Design B and Design C is improved since most of the trapped fields
are radiated at the patch edges and not at the edges of the substrate
as in Design A. Fig. 3(b) shows that Designs B and C have achieved a
gain increment of 2.32.8 dB compared to Design A over the frequency
band of 5764 GHz.
B. 60-GHz Patch Arrays With and Without Open Air Cavity
Designs A and C were chosen as the antenna elements for the 4 2 4
array designs, respectively. The inter-element spacing of the antenna
array is set at 0:60 . Fig. 4(a) shows the array where the concept of
Design C is implemented. Due to process limitations of LTCC, the substrate in between the rows also could not be removed entirely in the
radiating sides of the patches as shown in Fig. 4(b).

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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 59, NO. 9, SEPTEMBER 2011

Fig. 3. (a) Simulated jS

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and (b) gain of Design A, B and C.

Fig. 4. (a) Long rectangular open air cavities in between rows of the array and
(b) shorter open air cavities positioned at the radiating edges of patch array.
Fig. 6. (a) Microstrip-to-GCPW transition, (b) stripline-to-GCPW transition,
and (c) simulated jS j and jS j of the transitions.

Fig. 5. (a) Cavity with a microstrip feed-line, (b) cavity covered by an extra
LTCC layer with a microstrip feed-line, and (c) cavity with a stripline feed-line.

The microstrip feed network is designed on a single LTCC layer

which increases the fabrication difficulty since the area with open air
cavity is supported by this single LTCC layer as shown in Fig. 5(a).
A modified design was proposed to have an extra LTCC layer on the
patch side, as depicted in Fig. 5(b) to make it more robust. The stripline
feed is more preferable since it incorporates four LTCC layers and has
a bottom ground plane to separate the antenna from the rest of the chip
module as shown in Fig. 5(c).
A grounded co-planar waveguide (GCPW) transition is designed
so that the antenna can be measured with the patch facing upwards
into free space [9]. Fig. 6(a) shows the microstrip-to-GCPW transition
while Fig. 6(b) shows a stripline-to-GCPW transition. Fig. 6(c) shows
the simulated jS11 j and jS21 j of a back-to-back transition.
Fig. 7 shows the photos of the antenna arrays and their feeding structures on the back, respectively. Design I is the conventional microstrip
fed patch array, Design II is the microstrip fed open air cavity patch
array, Design III is the microstrip fed open air cavity patch with an
extra layer of LTCC substrate, and Design IV is the stripline fed open
air cavity patch. For the microstrip fed arrays, there is an open cavity
on the microstrip-side that prevents the microstrip feed network to be
in direct contact with the plate below when performing measurements.
III. MEASUREMENTS AND RESULTS
The measurements were conducted using a Cascade Microtech
Summit 11000 probe station and the Agilent E8361A vector network analyzer. The S11 , gain and radiation patterns were measured
on-wafer, with the patch array facing upwards into free space, away
from the antenna holder and probe station in a mini-chamber as shown

Fig. 7. 60-GHz patch arrays with backing feeds.

Fig. 8. 60-GHz on-wafer measurement setup for jS j, radiation patterns, and

gain: (a) antenna under test (AUT) i.e., antenna array, with on-wafer probe sitting on a holder and (b) transmit horn rotation.

in Fig. 8. The probe arms are connected to a straight and L-shape

holder, respectively for the E- and H-plane pattern measurements.
Fig. 9 compares the simulated and measured jS11 j of the antenna arrays. The bandwidths for jS11 j  010 dB are as follow: 17% (Design
I), 13% (Design II), 12% (Design III), and 7.8% (Design IV). Table I
compares the simulated and measured gain, and HPBW of Designs
IIV at 60 GHz, respectively. The gain of Designs IIIV is 1.42.1
dB higher than that of Design I at 60 GHz. All the designs have similar
beamwidths in both E- and H-planes although the gain for the four designs is different. It suggests that the arrays achieve different antenna
efficiency although the directivities of the designs are almost the same
because of the same size of the array apertures.
Fig. 10 shows the simulated and measured gain of Designs IIV. In
particular, Design IV realizes the highest gain increment compared to
Design I. Designs II and III have slight difference due to the presence

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Fig. 9. Simulated and measured jS

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 59, NO. 9, SEPTEMBER 2011

of the 60 GHz antenna arrays.

TABLE I
DIMENSION, GAIN AND BEAMWIDTH OF THE 60-GHz ANTENNA ARRAYS

Fig. 11. Measured radiation patterns of the antenna arrays at 60 GHz.

observed, which is mainly caused by fabrication tolerance and possible

effect of the measurement setup.
Fig. 10. Simulated and measured gain of antenna arrays.

of an extra layer of substrate for mechanical stability consideration.

Designs II and IV have difference being attributed by the losses in the
microstrip line feed as compared with the stripline and also the difference in patch dimensions.
Fig. 11 shows the measured co-polar radiation patterns for the antenna arrays in both the E- and H-planes. The measured cross-polarization levels in all the designs are almost 20 dB below the peak gain.
All designs have similar beamwidth but Design IV has the best front-toback ratio as expected due to the backing ground plane in the stripline
structure. Slight discrepancy between simulation and measurement is

IV. CONCLUSION
The technique of using open air cavity has been presented for
60-GHz LTCC antenna array designs and validated experimentally for
gain enhancement. It has been shown that the surface waves have been
suppressed in the arrays by partially removing the substrate around the
radiating edges of the patch elements. Compared with the conventional
patch antenna arrays without any open air cavity, such suppression of
the surface waves have increased the gain up to 2.8 dB over the band
of 5764 GHz. By incorporating a stripline feed, the structure is able
to provide an extra ground plane to lessen the effects of the circuit
underneath the antenna in a chip module. The use of open air cavities
to improve gain in the designs has been shown to be feasible in the

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 59, NO. 9, SEPTEMBER 2011

LTCC process. When compared to embedded air cavities, the design

is also more mechanically reliable.

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TABLE I
PUBLISHED RESULTS FOR THE 25-ELEMENT, 50-WAVELENGTH PROBLEM

ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors would like to thank J. Khoo from the Institute for Infocomm Research, Singapore, and K. Kautio, M. Lahti and K. Ronka
from VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland for their effort in the
fabrication of the antennas.

REFERENCES
[1] D. M. Pozar, Considerations for millimeter wave printed antennas,
IEEE Trans. Antennas Propag., vol. 31, no. 5, pp. 740747, Sept. 1983.
[2] A. E. I. Lamminen, A. R. Vimpari, and J. Saily, UC-EBG on LTCC for
60-GHz frequency band antenna applications, IEEE Trans. Antennas
Propag., vol. 57, no. 10, pp. 29042912, Oct. 2009.
[3] A. Panther, A. Petosa, M. G. Stubbs, and K. Kautio, A wideband array
of stacked patch antennas using embedded air cavities in LTCC, IEEE
Microw. Wireless Compon. Lett., vol. 15, no. 12, pp. 916918, Dec.
2005.
[4] A. E. I. Lamminen, J. Saily, and A. R. Vimpari, 60-GHz patch antennas and arrays on LTCC with embedded-cavity substrate, IEEE
Trans. Antennas Propag., vol. 56, no. 9, pp. 28652874, Sep. 2008.
[5] R. A. R. Solis, A. Melina, and N. Lopez, Microstrip patch encircled
by a trench, in Proc. IEEE Int. Symp. on Antennas Propag. Society,
Jul. 2000, vol. 3, pp. 16201623.
[6] Q. Chen, V. F. Fusco, M. Zheng, and P. S. Hall, Micromachined silicon antennas, in Proc. Int. Conf. on Microwave and Millimeter-Wave
Tech., Aug. 1998, pp. 289292.
[7] Q. Chen, V. F. Fusco, M. Zhen, and P. S. Hall, Trenched silicon microstrip antenna arrays with ground plane effects, in Proc. 29th Eur.
Microwave Conf., Oct. 1999, vol. 3, pp. 263266.
[8] S. B. Yeap and Z. N. Chen, Microstrip patch antennas with enhanced
gain by partial substrate removal, IEEE Trans. Antennas Propag., vol.
58, no. 9, pp. 28112816, Sept. 2010.
[9] S. B. Yeap, Z. N. Chen, A. C. W. Lu, V. Sunappan, and L. L. Wai,
60-GHz LTCC antenna array with microstrip to CPW transition, in
Proc. Asia Pacific Microwave Conf., Dec. 2009, pp. 19381941.

Weighted Thinned Linear Array Design With the Iterative

FFT Technique
Warren P. du Plessis
AbstractA version of the iterative Fourier technique (IFT) for the
design of thinned antenna arrays with weighted elements is presented.
The structure of the algorithm means that it is well suited to the design of
weighted thinned arrays with low current taper ratios (CTRs). A number
of test problems from the literature are considered, and in each case, the
IFT produces results with improved sidelobe level (SLL) at lower CTR.
Index TermsArray antennas, linear arrays, thinned arrays.

I. INTRODUCTION
Thinned arrays are formed from normal equally-spaced filled arrays
by deactivating a number of the elements. The aperture of the filled
array is maintained, so the width of the main beam is comparable to
that of the filled array and similar angular resolution is thus achieved.
Manuscript received October 08, 2010; revised February 06, 2011; accepted
February 09, 2011. Date of publication July 12, 2011; date of current version
September 02, 2011.
The author is with the Defence, Peace, Safety and Security (DPSS), Council
for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), Pretoria 0001, South Africa
(e-mail: wduplessis@ieee.org).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TAP.2011.2161450

However, the reduced number of active elements means that the size,
weight, cost and complexity of the antenna array, its feed network and
any signal processing are reduced [1][5].
Thinned arrays can be designed to have identical weights for all elements leading to benefits including simplified feed networks, and identical drive for power amplifiers when the array is used for transmission
[1], [6]. However, the additional degrees of freedom offered by control of
the weights of the antenna elements can lead to significant improvements
to the array parameters including the sidelobe level (SLL) [7], [8].
One of the key figures of merit of any array that utilizes weighted
element excitations is the ratio of the largest excitation magnitude to the
smallest excitation magnitudethe current taper ratio (CTR). Larger
CTRs are indicative of increased design complexity because of increased
challenges associated with issues such as realizing an appropriate feed
network and higher dynamic ranges for the transmitter and receiver
systems. Designing for a low CTR is thus desirable [1], [3], [4] with
equally-excited arrays having the lowest possible CTR of 1.
Sparse arrays are similar to thinned arrays except that the positions of
the antenna elements are not quantized. While this approach increases
design freedom, potentially leading to improved array performance,
periodic quantization of the element positions has a number of advantages. Coupling between antenna elements is essentially identical when
the element positions are quantized, simplifying the design. Quantization also means that the results are valid for all frequencies below
the design frequency because of the polynomial nature of the results.
Furthermore, no limitation is placed on the maximum scan angle of
the array when the element spacing is quantized to multiples of half a
wavelength.
These points are clearly demonstrated through the use of the example
of 25 elements in a linear aperture 50 wavelengths long. A number of
published results for this problem are summarized in Table I. The first
solution uses a cyclic difference set and represents the best value that
has been obtained without resorting to iterative numerical methods. Solutions L2 and L3 and are equally-excited arrays and represent compromises between sidelobe level (SLL) and beamwidth. Solutions L4
to L8 show that considerable SLL improvements can be achieved when
the elements are weighted at the cost of increasing the CTR. Solutions
L9 and L10 give results whose element positions are quantized twentieths of a wavelength and achieve significantly better SLL than the

0018-926X/$26.00 2011 IEEE