Design and Fabrication of a High-Gain 60-GHz Corrugated Slot Antenna Array With Ridge Gap Waveguide Distribution Layer

A wideband high-gain high-efficiency 16 x 16-element slot antenna array is presented for 60-GHz band applications. The antenna is designed based on gap waveguide technology. The most important advantage of using this technology is its ability to decrease complexity and cost of fabrication because there is no requirement of electrical contact between the three layers of the antenna structure. The three layers are a corrugated metal plate with radiating slots, a subarray cavity layer, and a ridge gap waveguide (RGW) feed network layer. The corporate feed network is realized by a texture of pins and guiding ridges in a metal plate. Also, in order to excite the antenna with a standard V-band rectangular waveguide, a transition from RGW to WR-15 is designed. The radiating elements, corrugations, cavity layer, power dividers, and transition are designed and optimized to suppress the reflection coefficient at the input WR-15 port over the desired frequency range from 57 to 66 GHz. Finally, the 16 x 16-element slot antenna array is fabricated by the standard milling technology. The measured results demonstrate about 16% of reflection coefficient bandwidth (vertical bar S-11 vertical bar < -10 dB) covering the 56-65.7-GHz frequency range, and the measured gain is larger than 32.5 dBi over the band with more than 70% antenna efficiency.