Multi-Port Driven Radiators

S. M. Bowers and A. Hajimiri

Integrated multi-port driven (MPD) radiator design is presented as an approach that takes advantage of the increased design space offered by using a hybrid design of an antenna with multiple ports and its driver circuitry integrated together on a single substrate. This reduces costly losses by eliminating independent elements for power combination, output impedance matching networks, and power transfer by engineering current patterns on a chip based on the desired far field pattern. The electromagnetic radiation produced by a circularly polarized MPD antenna is calculated analytically to provide design intuition, with supporting electromagnetic simulations. A single element 160 GHz MPD antenna and the supporting driver circuitry is designed and fabricated in a 0.13 SiGe BiCMOS process. A tuned 8 phase ring oscillator generates the signal with each phase feeding class A power amplifiers that drive the antenna. The radiator achieves 4.6 dBm single element effective isotropically radiated power (EIRP) and total radiated power of 2.0 dBm at 161 GHz while consuming 117.5 mA DC current from a 3.3 V source. Measurements of three frequency bands at 145, 154 and 161 GHz show greater than 0 dBm EIRP for each band, demonstrating the wide band nature of the antenna.