Compact 60GHz Base Station with Planar Antenna Array on Glass Substrate

In Radio-over-Fiber (RoF) systems, wireless signals are transported over optical carriers, converted to electrical domain and subsequently radiated. A planar antenna on the RF substrate increases the level of system integration and lowers the manufacturing cost for those systems. We investigate in this paper the performance of a planar 2 × 2 antenna array integrated on the base station (BS) front-end of the RoF-wireless link with low-cost electronics components. The measured gain of the antenna which is integrated on BS front-end is 6dBi and the matching is better than -10dB at 60GHz. The BS front-end is the hybrid realization of two substrates namely Isola Itera MT and fused silica and has low noise figure of 3 dB. The power consumed by the BS front-end (without photodiode) was estimated to be 2600mW. The EIRP of the BS front-end was measured to be 13dBm at 60GHz.