mm-Wave High Gain Cavity-Backed Aperture-Coupled Patch Antenna Array

A wideband and high gain cavity-backed 4 × 4 patch antenna array is proposed in this paper. Each patch antenna element of the array is enclosed by a rectangular cavity and differentially-fed by the slot underneath. By optimizing the geometry of the radiating patch and the cavity, a very uniform E-field distribution at the antenna aperture is achieved, leading to the high array aperture efficiency and thus the gain. Taking advantages of the higher-order substrate integrated cavity excitation, the elements of the array are efficiently fed with the same amplitude and phase in a simplified feeding mechanism instead of the conventional bulky and lossy power-splitter-based feeding network. Measured results show the antenna bandwidth is from 56 to 63.1-GHz (16.1%) with the peak gain reaching 21.4 dBi. The radiation patterns of the array are very stable over the entire frequency band and the cross-polarizations are as low as -30 dB. These good characteristics demonstrate that the proposed array can be a good candidate for the future 60-GHz communication system applications.