Analysis and Design of Millimeter-Wave Circularly Polarized Substrate Integrated Travelling-Wave Antennas

Circularly polarized millimeter-wave travelling-wave antennas, using substrate integrated circuits (SICs) technology, are designed, fabricated and tested. By using the SICs technology, compact antennas with low losses in the feeding structure and with good design accuracy are obtained. The elementary antenna which is composed of two inclined slots is characterized by full-wave simulations. This characterization is used for the design and development of linear antenna arrays with above 16 dB gain and low side lobe level (< −25 dB), using different power aperture distributions, namely uniform, Tchebychev and Taylor. Experimental results are presented at 77 GHz showing that the proposed antennas present good performances in terms of impedance matching, gain and axial ratio. These antennas have potential applications in integrated transceivers for communication and radar systems at millimeter-wave frequencies.