A Power-Efficient Compact Ku-Band System-on-Antenna Module with Chip-First Package Integration

This work focuses on the unique capabilities that aerosol jet printing (AJP) provides for manufacturing transmit/receive RF front-end modules for microwave and mm-wave applications. We demonstrate an additively manufactured (AM) transmitter system-on-antenna (SoA) at Ku-band, with the transmitter circuit being fully AM packaged on a conventionally manufactured Vivaldi antenna. The entire package is printed on-antenna via AJP around an amplifier die using a chip-first approach. Our transmit module achieves radiated power levels of 0.4-0.66 W, higher than other Ku-band SoAs in the literature. This work shows it is possible to realize high-functional-density RF front-end modules fully via AJP, overcoming the performance bottlenecks introduced by conventional manufacturing methods and reducing prototyping cost and time.