Gain Enhancement Techniques for mm-Wave On-Chip Antennas on Lossy CMOS Platforms

With the advent of number of applications in the mm-wave bands, antenna sizes are becoming small enough to fit them on mm-scale Integrated Circuits (ICs), commonly known as microchips. Integration of antenna on a chip along with the driving circuits in the standard CMOS process can enable a true RF System-on-Chip (SoC) solution, however, Silicon used in CMOS is very lossy and has a high dielectric constant. This results in low gain and efficiency antennas which also suffer from surface waves issues at mm-wave frequencies. In this paper, we will present Artificial Magnetic Conductor (AMC) surface to increase the gain/efficiency of the on-chip antenna realized in standard CMOS platforms. The gain and radiation efficiency of 1.7dBi and 42.52% are achieved respectively.