Ultra-Compact Micromachined Beam-Steering Antenna Front-End for High-Resolution Sub-Terahertz Radar

This paper reports on an ultra-compact sub-THz frequency based beam-steering radar antenna front-end implementation utilizing a micromachined parallel-plate waveguide based leaky wave antenna. At a size of only 24 × 24 × 0.9 mm³, the beam-steering front-end antenna has a 28 dBi gain and a 45° field of view for scanning over 220-300 GHz. As compared to a theoretical range resolution of 6.8 mm, a range resolution of 1.2 cm was experimentally verified for 2.5 cm large targets separated by 8°. Furthermore, this paper shows a signal processing technique for frequency-steerable antennas which achieves high angular target separation by splitting the measurement frequency range into sub-sections to isolate similar slant range close-proximity targets into different frequency spaces.