A Shared Aperture Cavity Slot Antenna-in-Package Concept featuring End-Fire and Broadside Radiation for Enhanced Beam Coverage of mmWave Mobile Devices

Abstract

A shared aperture cavity slot antenna (SACSA) is proposed and demonstrated at millimeter-wave spectrum for the first time. The end-fire and broadside antennas can independently operate within an identical cavity, thus sharing a common aperture. The end-fire antenna is implemented as an open-ended cavity slot antenna topology featuring + y -axis directional beam and broadside antenna is realized as a cavity backed slot antenna featuring + z -axis directional beam. For reducing a mutual coupling between end-fire and broadside antennas, two antennas are designed to feature orthogonal polarization of each other. The reflection coefficients of two antennas satisfy less than -10 dB at operating frequency band while maintaining mutual coupling coefficient under -25 dB. The realized gain of 1×4 SACSA is approximately 9.56 dBi for end-fire antenna and 8.9 dBi for broadside antenna, and 3 dB scanning angle of both antennas is ±45° at respective dominant directions. Accordingly, the proposed SACSA can be implemented as a compact size of antenna-in-package by sharing the aperture of two antennas and enhancing beamforming coverage by independently steering two separate beams.