Industrial Design Validation for a Plane Wave Generator at 28GHz

In recent research, we introduced a pioneering concept: a Plane Wave Generator (PWG) optimized for millimeter-wave Over the Air (OTA) testing applications. The industrialized PWG incorporates substantial enhancements over the previously presented breadboard models, a result of valuable insights gained during its development phase. This industrial unit has been meticulously manufactured and subjected to rigorous testing within a state-of-the-art Planar Near-Field (PNF) measurement facility. The industrial design of the PWG, operates from 24.25 GHz to 29.5 GHz frequency range, with a Quiet Zone of 38cm diameter. The measured performances reveal very good performance with amplitude variations ranging from ± 0.9dB to ± 1.7dB and phase variations between ±9° and ± 20°. This paper discusses the newly developed and optimized measurement process for calibrating and assessing the Quiet Zone (QZ), with the primary goal of substantially reducing the overall measurement time. By harnessing a surrogate model, our proposed QZ evaluation technique now delivers results in just one day, marking a substantial advancement over the previous method, which necessitated nearly a week for measurements and subsequent post-processing.