An Integrated Slot-Ring Traveling-Wave Radiator

Electromagnetic duality is used to design a multi-port traveling-wave slot-ring antenna with on-chip driver circuitry to create a fully integrated radiator. By creating a slot version of the multi-port driven antenna, the required exclusive use area of the antenna is significantly decreased, while still being able to perform impedance matching, power combining, and power transfer off chip through electromagnetic radiation in a single step. The driver core consists of an oscillator followed by three amplification stages. A split path inductor design was utilized to reduce the radiator's dependence on process variation in the metal stack while ensuring proper isolation between the four quadrature paths. The slot radiator has a simulated antenna efficiency of 39% and a measured single-element effective isotropic radiated power of 6.0 dBm with a total radiated power of -1.3 dBm at 134.5 GHz.