A Bi-material Fully Aerosol Jet printed W-band Quasi-Yagi-Uda Antenna

This paper presents for the first time the successful fabrication of a bi-material, fully printed W-band quasi-Yagi-Uda antenna using the Aerosol Jet printing (AJP) technology. A 4 mil Liquid Crystal Polymer (LCP) was used as the host substrate, on top of which the ground plane, the dielectric substrate and the metal antenna layer were Aerosol Jet printed. Various sizes of nozzles were used to achieve quality geometry resolution and fast prototyping. Specifically, the ground plane and the metal antenna layer were printed with silver ink using the 150 μm and 100 μm nozzles, respectively. The dielectric substrate however, was deposited using polyimide with the 300 μm nozzle. The S
₁₁
was measured as -20 dB at the resonance frequency of 92.7 GHz and matches well with the -31.6 dB of simulated S
₁₁
at 94 GHz. The measured and simulated -10 dB impedance bandwidth were 12.5 GHz and 8.1 GHz, respectively. 7.65 dBi of simulated maximum realized gain and 9 GHz of simulated 3 dB bandwidth were also obtained.