High frequency integrated feed for front end circuitry and antenna arrays

✍ Scribed by Dan Busuioc; Safieddin Safavi-Naeini; Mahmoud Shahabadi

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2009
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 447 KB
• Volume: 19
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1096-4290
• DOI: 10.1002/mmce.20359

✦ Synopsis

Low-cost printed circuit board waveguide (PCBWG) technology is employed to develop new waveguide-fed microstrip antenna arrays with low profile and light weight while maintaining high efficiency and gain at 12.5 GHz. The proposed corporate feed network has two parts: on the antenna layer, microstrip lines are used to form a 2 3 4 sequentially rotated sub-array of circularly polarized microstrip patches and on the feed layer PCB-WG is utilized to combine any number of these sub-arrays to form a larger array. Because PCB-WGs transmit the power over a large portion of the feed network, losses are substantially reduced and spurious radiations from feed circuit are eliminated. Several microstrip arrays with PCBWG feed were designed and fabricated using standard PCB process. Comparing the results with those of a hybrid array with conventional waveguide feed shows that there is only a negligible degradation in gain and efficiency when bulky and expensive aluminum waveguides are replaced by PCB-WGs. V