A Wideband Fully Planar Vivaldi Antenna for WPAN Applications

The availability of large bandwidth in the ISM band around 60 GHz is very useful for data hungry applications such as WPAN. Being allocated as an ISM band, several research papers have been published on completely integrated RF systems using CMOS technology. Although the circuits for these implementations have been realized on silicon, the antennas are usually done off-chip. The reason is the lossy nature of the silicon substrate for RF frequencies. Instead of using resonant antennas, if travelling wave antennas are used for such an application then a better efficiency can be achieved from such designs. In this work, a fully planar Vivaldi antenna is reported on 65 nm CMOS stack up. For the first time, the feed of the antenna is integrated on the same conductor layer as the antenna itself. Using this design technique the problem of thin gap between the metal layers have been mitigated. The final simulations show that the antenna covers the complete ISM band and works well from 57 GHz to 66 GHz. The gain of the antenna is -3dBi. The results show that the design is quite suitable for integration in a millimeter range transceiver for short range wireless communication.