High gain/bandwidth off-chip antenna loaded with metamaterial unit-cell impedance matching circuit for sub-terahertz near-field electronic systems

An innovative of-chip antenna (OCA) is presented that exhibits high gain and efciency performance at the terahertz (THz) band and has a wide operational bandwidth. The proposed OCA is implemented on stacked silicon layers and consists of an open circuit meandering line. It is shown that by loading the antenna with an array of subwavelength circular dielectric slots and terminating it with a metamaterial unit cell, its impedance bandwidth is enhanced by a factor of two and its gain on average by about 4 dB. Unlike conventional antennas, where the energy is dissipated in a resistive load, the technique proposed here signifcantly reduces losses. The antenna is excited from underneath the anten…