Design of 60 GHz mm-wave patch antenna arrays

The paper presents the implementation of three 60 GHz patch antennas, including a single patch antenna, two antenna arrays with 4×1 and 4×4 patch unit respectively. The antennas are designed for front-ends of 60 GHz wireless communication subsystems. To acquire a more concentrated radiation direction and a higher gain, two antenna arrays are designed which increase the propagation distance of the communication subsystem. A four-way power divider combined with a series and parallel network is employed to feed for the antenna array which improves the bandwidth performance of antenna arrays. These antennas are fabricated based on Rogers RT/duroid 5880 substrate. The measured results fit well with the simulated data. This is a very difficult work in such a high frequency band and rarely seen in other papers. The 4 × 1 antenna array was successfully applied in a transceiver system. The bandwidth of the single patch antenna is 3 GHz and both of the arrays are around 10 GHz with the return loss better than −10 dB. The maximum gains are 7.65, 12.5, 18 dBi, respectively.