Research On 94GHz Millimeter-wave Side-fire And End-fire Microstrip On-chip Antenna Based On CMOS Technology

The microwave atmospheric window seated on W-band(75 GHz-110 GHz) has a extremely wide bandwidth whose center frequency is 94 GHz, and it is considered a valuable and immense spectrum resource. Compared with infrared and visible light, millimeter wave enjoys better penetrability and is less affected by atmospheric attenuation. It is less affected by weather conditions such as cloud, dust, small rain and snow. In other words, millimeter wave can work all day long. Its advantages make millimeter wave good candidate for applications like radar, guidance system, electronic countermeasure, millimeter wave communication, millimeter wave remote sensing, millimeter wave imaging and other fields. And all these things prompts the rapid development of millimeter wave solid-state circuits and integrated circuits especially. Microwave integrated circuits has many advantages over traditional microwave solid-state circuits, such as small volume, mass production and low cost. As one of the most popular technologies for manufacturing integrated circuits nowadays, CMOS technology is very suitable for millimeter wave circuits fabrication. As millimeter wave on-chip antennas play key roles and is of great significance in realizing System-on-Chip(SoC) for millimeter wave integrated circuits and they enable inter and intro-connections of chips, CMOS on-chip antennas are studied a lot all over the world in recent years. This paper will introduce on-chip antennas that is implemented in CMOS process.First of all, the first chapter of this paper introduces the current research status of on-chip antenna all over the world. It shows on-chip antennas with lowresistance substrates, on-chip antennas with high-resistance substrates, and some popular technologies currently used in on-chip antenna designs such as artificial magnetic conductor(AMC) technology and dielectric resonator technology. And we also expound the importance of integrating antennas to integrated circuits and obstacles existing in current integration technologies. In the second chapter, we briefly introduce CMOS technology and dielectric resonator technology. As one of the most popular technology for making integrated circuits, CMOS technology owns many advantages, but the use of low-resistance silicon substrate that could cause serious loss of radiating energy has brought great difficulties to on-chip antenna designs. Dielectric resonators are used for improving the efficiency and the gain of the on-chip-antennas in this paper. It is the key to obtain desired radiation patterns. Rectangular dielectric resonators with different sizes and different dielectric constants will bring different resonant modes, and good designs of dielectric resonator can help on-chip antenna achieve a big qualitative leap, making up the defects that low-resistance silicon substrate brings.The third chapter introduces the basic ideas of our design and the test scheme of our 94 GHz microstrip patch on-chip antenna. Different from the mainstream concepts of on-chip antenna design, Microstrip antenna technology, as a very mature antenna technology, provides a way for designing on-chip antennas, because the metal ground plane may help forcing the antenna radiating to the opposite side to the lossy silicon. The two-metal-layer microstrip-like structure proposed in this paper can reduce the design cost, increases the flexibility of the integration of the on-chip antennas, and at the same obtain good performances. and we also verify the fact in simulation that by increasing the thickness of the silicon dioxide(SiO2) between the two metal layers(the ground plane layer and the microstrip patch layer), the gain of the microstrip on-chip antenna can be improved. In the fourth chapter we try to put different dielectric resonators upon the microstrip on-chip antenna. The W-band on-antennas using the dielectric resonator technique are very small and the absolute bandwidthes they own are very wide. Relatively high efficiencies, high gain and also radiation patterns including side-fire radiation and end-fire radiation under the condition of applying very thin SiO2 layer are achieved.