Scalable Wideband and Wide-Angle Beam Steering mm-Wave/THz Radiator and Phased Arrays in Silicon

In this paper, we describe a new approach for implementing mm-wave and THz fully integrated circuits based on standing waves. The standing wave structure can be scaled to boost the radiated power without the need for lossy coupling circuits. A 1 × 4 coherent radiator array and a 2 × 2 phased array were implemented at 0.34 THz in a 0.13μm SiGe BiCMOS process along with on-chip antennas and are described in this paper. Taking advantage of the potentials of this approach, we were able to achieve wideband operation with varactor-less frequency tuning and wide 2D beam steering without phase shifters. To our knowledge, the implemented phased array achieves the highest frequency tuning range (15.1%) and widest beam steering (128°/53°) among reported fully integrated THz phased arrays.