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2012 IEEE Asia-Pacific Conference on Antennas and Propagation, August 27-29, 2012, Singapore

Antenna on a Thick Resin layer of a Silicon Chip and


a Slab Antenna fed by Post-wall Waveguide
(Invited Paper)
J.Hirokawa*, J.Asano, M.Ando

R.Suga

H.Nakano, Y.Hirachi

Dept. of Electrical & Electronic Eng.


Tokyo Institute of Technology
Tokyo, Japan
jiro@antenna.ee.titech.ac.jp

Dept. of Electrical Eng. & Electronics


Aoyama Gakuin University
Sagamihara, Japan
rsuga@ee.aoyama.ac.jp

Ammsys Inc.
Tokyo, Japan
y.hirachi@ammsys.jp

AbstractThis paper presents two topics on antennas in


packaging for millimeter-wave applications. One is on a patch
antenna on a thick resin layer of a silicon chip to achieve high
radiation efficiency and to try to connect a RF circuit on the
opposite side of the chip through a coax-line structure. The other
is a dielectric-slab antenna fed by post-wall waveguide to have
about 45-degree beam-width in both the E and H planes and to
achieve 46dB isolation by arraying the two antennas in the Hplane.
Keywords- package; chip antenna; slab antenna; post-wall
waveguide; isolation

I.

INTRODUCTION

Recently, there are many discussions on antenna integration


with a 60GHz silicon CMOS chip ([1], [2] for example).
Typically there are two ways of the integrations. One is to
integrate an antenna in a chip and the other is to integrate an
antenna separately from a chip. This paper presents antennas
for these two integrations. When an antenna is integrated on the
same layer of a RF circuit in a chip, the radiation efficiency is
quite low due to small height (typically 10m) of the RF circuit
layer. We proposed the configuration where an antenna is
integrated on a thick resin layer of 200m on the opposite side
of a RF circuit layer through a hole in a silicon chip [3]. The
thick resin layer can make the radiation efficiency large and the
connection loss can be small. We also have been developing a
dielectric-slab antenna fed by post-wall waveguide, which is
separated from a chip [4]. The antenna has about 45-degree
beam-width in both the E and H planes suitable for use of kiosdownload and achieves 46dB isolation by arraying the two
antennas in the H-plane sufficient for TDD (time division
duplexing).
II.

ANTENNA ON A THICK RESIN LAYER OF A SILICON CHIP

We have investigated the feasibility of a patch antenna fed


through a hole with a coaxial line. Fig.1 shows the
configuration of the antenna on a silicon chip of 5mm square
placed in a fixture of 20mm square. The square patch antenna
is trimmed off at two corners to radiate circular polarization.
The design frequency is 60.0GHz. The silicon chip has a hole
with 0.5mm diameter coated by copper on the wall to act as the
outer conductor of a coaxial line. The resin has a hole with
0.3mm diameter to insert a pin of a glass bead to act as the
inner conductor. An air region is placed between the antenna

978-1-4673-0668-3/12/$31.00 2012 IEEE

and the fixture for matching. A choke is also installed to


prevent from leakage between the chip and the fixture. We
fabricate four patch antennas with same dimension. The
designed reflection is below -15dB from 58.5GHz to 63.5GHz.
The measured reflection of all the four antennas is shifted a bit
lower than the designed one but the bandwidth for the
reflection below -15dB is almost the same between the
measurement and the design. Fig.2 shows the frequency
dependence of the measured gain. The designed gain is about
5dBic at 60GHz. There is variation among the four fabricated
antennas, but the antennas #2 and #3 have similar frequency
dependence to the design. The measured spin-linear radiation
pattern has good agreement to the simulation over all angle
regions because the design includes the structure of the fixture.
The minimum of the axial ratio of the four antennas is about
1dB, which is equal to the simulation. The measured 3dB
bandwidth is a bit narrower than the designed one (1.5GHz).
III.

SLAB ANTENNA FED BY POST-WALL WAVEGUIDE

Fig.3 shows the antenna structure. The antenna is made of


three dielectric layers, which are a post-wall waveguide layer
and two microstrip line (MSL) layers. The MSL layers made of
thin buildup film were laminated on the top and bottom of the
post-wall waveguide layer which thickness is 0.86 mm. The
substrates for the MSL and post-wall waveguide layer are an
epoxy substrate and a glass cloth-epoxy resin substrate,
respectively. The post-wall waveguide is formed between
metal 1 and metal 4 as shown in Fig.3. An open stub,
MSL/waveguide transition and the GSG pad are printed on the
top MSL layer. A key for the required beamwidth is to realize a
large effective aperture area in the E plane with a planar
substrate with fixed thickness. For realizing broadband
characteristics, the dielectric slab waveguide is arranged in
front of the open-ended post-wall waveguide as a substitute for
the directors made of metallic parasitic elements, which have
narrow band characteristics. The beamwidth in the E plane and
gain are determined by the length of the slab waveguide. Two
metal side walls made of via-holes are arranged on the both
side of the slab waveguide. The walls are for the design of the
beamwidth in the H plane and to suppress the mutual coupling
between two antennas arrayed in the H plane for realizing the
high isolation. The transition between the post-wall waveguide
and slab waveguide should be designed to realize lower
reflection and not to excite evanescent modes.

IV.

7
6

Gain[dBi]

The calculated and measured isolations between the two


antennas arrayed in the H plane in the antenna-package (Fig.4)
and the required isolation are shown in Fig.5. The result is
compared with that of the conventional antenna with loop-type
directors [5]. The transmission loss of the CPW was measured
to be less than 0.1 dB in the frequency range of 50 - 70 GHz
and is confirmed negligibly small. The reflection coefficient of
the antenna seen from the bent CPW was measured to be -10
dB in the frequency range of 58.3 - 64.6 GHz. The isolation
level is improved by 6.0 dB to 27.5 dB in the frequency range
compared with the conventional one. The measured isolation of
the antenna-package with the slab waveguide is more than 38.1
dB and on the average of 46.0 dB.

1202_1
1202_2
1202_3
1202_5
Design

2
1
0
55

57.5

60
Frequency[GHz]

62.5

65

Fig.2 Measured gain

CONCLUSION

We have presented two types of the antennas suitable for


packaging for millimeter-wave applications.
REFERENCES
[1]

[2]

[3]

[4]

[5]

J.Grzyb, D.Liu and B.Gaucher, Packaging effects of a broadband 60


GHz cavity-backed folded dipole superstrate antenna, IEEE AP-S Intl.
Symp,. 331-3, pp.4365-4368, 2007.
A.Babakhani, D.B.Rutledge, A.Hajimiri, mm-wave phased arrays in
silicon with integrated antennas, IEEE AP-S Intl. Symp., 331-4,
pp.4369-4372, 2007.
K.Kimishima, J.Hirokawa, R.Suga, H.Nakano, Y.Hirachi and M.Ando,
"Feasibility study of a millimeter-wave antenna on a thick resin layer on
the back side of a silicon CMOS chip," Intl. Symp. Antennas Propagat.,
TP-C06-4, Oct. 2008.
R. Suga, H. Nakano, Y. Hirachi, J. Hirokawa, and M. Ando,
Millimeter-wave antenna with high-isolation using slab waveguide for
WPAN applications, Euro. Microwave Conf., 32-4, Oct. 2011.
R. Suga, H. Nakano, Y. Hirachi, J. Hirokawa, and M. Ando, Costeffective 60-GHz antenna package with end-fire radiation for wireless
file-transfer system, IEEE Trans. Microw. Theory and Tech., vol.58,
no.12, pp. 3989 3995, Dec. 2010.

Fig.3 Slab antenna fed by post-wall waveguide

Fig.4 Fabricated antenna-package with two antennas for Tx and Rx.

Fig.1 Antenna on the thick resin of a silicon chip with a fixture


Fig.5 Isolation between two antennas arrayed in H-plane

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