New thermoplastic polymer substrate for microstrip antennas at 60 GHz

Since the license-exempt band at 60 GHz has paved the way for the emerging broadband multimedia applications, the last few years witnessed a rapid development in the mm-wave technology. The development of cost efficient, low profile, and light-weight antenna systems is always a challenge, particularly for mm-waves. We designed a linearly polarized single patch, as well as a 4×4 array, microstrip antenna on the low loss thermoplastic polymer material ER182. A 3D frequency domain solver is used in the antennas´ development while a 3D time domain solver is used to confirm the results. Prototypes of the designs are fabricated and measured. The measurement of the single patch antenna shows the ability to obtain a gain in the range of 7 dBi and an impedance bandwidth of 1.5 GHz while the 4×4 array antenna attained a gain of 16.7 dBi and 2 GHz impedance bandwidth. The ER182 material is characterized at different frequencies and it exhibits a loss performance as good as 0.65 dB/cm at 60 GHz for a 50 Ω microstrip line on a 100 μm substrate thickness.