A Terahertz On-Chip Antenna With Wide Impedance and Gain Bandwidths

A terahertz (THz) on-chip antenna with wide impedance and gain bandwidths is proposed in this paper. The antenna exploits the inherent semi-conducting substrate in CMOS technologies, a commonly seen adversary in antenna designs, to construct a rectangular dielectric resonator (DR). With proper design, multiple high-order DR modes and the cavity mode are excited, which greatly expands the bandwidth and improves the gain. Simulations show that the −10-dB impedance bandwidth and 3-dB gain bandwidths are 50% and 34.5% (@325 GHz) respectively, with a peak gain of 6.5 dBi at 305 GHz. For validation, the antenna is fabricated by using TSMC 65-nm CMOS technology and then measured by a dedicated terahertz measurement setup. The fabricated sample shows a peak gain of 8.6 dBi and the maximum radiation efficiency of 44% at 295 GHz. To the best of authors’ knowledge, this is the widest fully-integrated on-chip antenna (OCA) working at THz frequencies.