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RESEARCH PRODUCT

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

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description

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 antenna by coupling RF energy from an open-circuited feedline through a slot in the ground-plane of the middle substrate layer. The feedline is shielded with another substrate layer which has a ground-plane on its opposite surface to mitigate the infuence of the structure on which the antenna is mounted. The antenna has the dimensions 12.3× 4.5 × 0.905 ­mm3 and operates across the 0.137–0.158THz band corresponding to a fractional bandwidth of 14.23%. Over this frequency range the average measured gain and efciency are 8.6 dBi and 77%, respectively. These characteristics makes the proposed antenna suitable for integration in sub-terahertz near-feld electronic systems such as radio frequency identifcation (RFID) devices with high spatial resolution. Dr. Mohammad Alibakhshikenari acknowledges support from the CONEX-Plus programme funded by Universidad Carlos III de Madrid and the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 801538. Additionally, this work was partially supported by RTI2018-095499-B-C31, Funded by Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades, Gobierno de España (MCIU/AEI/FEDER,UE), and by the Icelandic Centre for Research (RANNIS) Grant 206606, and by National Science Centre of Poland Grant 2018/31/B/ST7/02369.