Air-Filled Long Slot Leaky-Wave Antenna Based on Folded Half-Mode Waveguide Using Silicon Bulk Micromachining Technology for Millimeter-Wave Band

An air-filled long slot leaky-wave antenna (LWA) based on folded half-mode waveguide (FHMW) fabricated using silicon substrate is proposed for millimeter-wave application. As is well known, the high-permittivity silicon dielectric is not suitable for antenna design. Thanks to the through-wafer dry etching and gold-plating processes deriving from the silicon bulk micromachining technology, three purely air-filled structures including the vertical part of the FHMW that also acts as the leaky-wave long slot in the top layer, horizontal part of the FHMW and matching section in the middle layer, and coupling slot in the bottom layer constitute the high-performance air-filled long slot LWA. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first time that an FHMW is adopted for antenna design. Compared with the conventional half-mode waveguide, the profile is lowered, the required silicon layer number is fixed to three, and the design can be more flexible. Experiment of the fabricated prototype shows that the main beam can be scanned from 41° to 49° with a gain variation between 13.15 and 15.41 dBi in the frequency range from 56 to 64 GHz. Moreover, confirmation of the design strategy provides the feasibility to realize the system-in-package solution.