Novel High Efficiency V-Band Pure TEM D-PRGW Antenna for 5G mmWave Applications

Abstract

This paper starts with the proposal of an enhanced version of a planar rectangular slot antenna fed by the quasi-TEM printed ridge gap waveguide (PRGW), attended with a numerical study of a miniaturization procedure showing the limitations of the conventional PRGW-based antennas. Then innovative solution is introducing a new miniaturized pure TEM wide-band slot antenna utilizing double PRGW (D-PRGW) technology; the proposed approach is self-packaged and shows high potential for enhancing antenna performance, particularly in terms of bandwidth, gain, and compactness. This technology is featured with low loss, high performance, and compact size; it consists of surrounding the ridge area with a double layer of electromagnetic band gap (EBG) lattice instead of one to eliminate the surface waves effectively and keep the signal completely confined inside the ridge area with strict minimum rows of EBG. Therefore, a broad impedance matching bandwidth (|S11| ≤ −10 dB) of 33.33% is obtained from 50 to 70 GHz, which covers the unlicensed NR parts (n262; amp; n263) of the V band. Furthermore, the antenna achieves a peak gain of approximately 16 at 65 GHz while the overall efficiency remains above 90% across the entire operating frequency band. The high performance along with the compact size of this novel design makes it a good candidate for 5G wireless communications applications centered around 60 GHz.