WITH THE excitement buzzing around emerging millimeter-wave applications, potential opportunities in the consumer-electronics segment have been garnering attention. At the Terahertz Communications Lab at Germany's TU Braunschweig, for example, single planar-element designs working around 122 GHz have been presented by Pablo Herrero, Martin Jacob, and Joerg Schoebel. To fulfill potential commercial applications, they explored structures with different radiation patterns. The antennas also are implemented with commercial substrate and common lithography to meet the low-cost requirements of the consumer space.
All of the antennas can be built using standard circuit-board technology (with a minimum feature size of 80 to 100 m) and commercial RF substrates (such as Rogers 3003 or Arlon CLTE-AT). Fabricated antennas were measured using a vector network analyzer (VNA) and rectangular waveguide external mixers, which used a self-designed microstrip-torectangular-waveguide transition. The measured results were in strong agreement with the simulations. See "Single Elements for Low Cost Planar Antenna Arrays for Consumer Applications Beyond 100 GHz," Microwave And Optical Technology Letters, Dec. 2010, p. 2685.