60 GHz high-gain aperture-coupled microstrip antennas using soft-surface and stacked cavity on LTCC multilayer technology

In this paper, an aperture-coupled patch antenna integrated with a soft surface and the stacked cavity has been demonstrated on LTCC multilayer technology. A higher gain (~ 7.6 dBi) is achieved by stacking the cavity underneath the soft surface, which is 2.4 dB improvement compared to the patch antenna with the soft surface. It is also confirmed that the back radiation is significantly reduced by about 2.5 dB by stacking cavity to the patch antenna with the soft surface. The compact antenna with the soft surface and the stacked cavity can be easily integrated into 3-D 60 GHz modules and be easily extendable to array configuration for point-to-point applications in short-range indoor wireless personal area network (WPAN)