Integrated Metal-lens Antennas with Reduced Height at 71–76 GHz

A low-profile lens antenna with high efficiency is desired in many millimeter-wave applications. In this work, a new approach to integrate a dielectric lens and a metal-lens is studied to minimize the lens height. The proposed integrated metal-lens antenna minimizes the height while maintaining aperture efficiency close to that of traditional elliptical integrated lens antennas. In case of low permittivity materials, the height of the designed lens can be 35% smaller. An integrated metal-lens antenna with 8λ0 radius is designed with Teflon (ϵr = 2.1 and tanδ = 0.0002) and 0.575λ0 parallel plate separation for operation at lower E-band, i.e., 71–76 GHz. The simulated boresight directivity of the designed lens is 32.6 dB and the peak aperture efficiency is 80%. The 3-dB gain bandwidth of the designed dual-polarized integrated metal-lens antenna is approx. 10% and the gain scan loss is 7.4 dB for beam steering range of ±30°.

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