A wideband millimeter-wave circularly polarized antenna with 3-D printed polarizer

This paper presents a wideband circularly polarized millimeter-wave (mmw) antenna design. We introduce a novel 3-D-printed polarizer, which consists of several air and dielectric slabs to transform the polarization of the antenna radiation from linear to circular. The proposed polarizer is placed above a radiating aperture operating at the center frequency of 60 GHz. An electric field, E, radiated from the aperture generates two components of electric fields, E_x and E_y. After passing through the polarizer, both E_x and E_y fields can be degenerated with an orthogonal phase difference which results in having a wide axial ratio bandwidth. The phase difference between E_x and E_y is determined by the incident angle φ, of the polarization of the electric field to the polarizer as well as the thickness, h, of the dielectric slabs. With the help of the thickness of the polarizer, the directivity of the radiation pattern is increased so as to devote high-gain and wideband characteristics to the antenna. To verify our concept, an intensive parametric study and an experiment were carried out. Three antenna sources, including dipole, patch, and aperture antennas, were investigated with the proposed 3-D-printed polarizer. All measured results agree with the theoretical analysis. The proposed antenna with the polarizer achieves a wide impedance bandwidth of 50% from 45 to 75 GHz for the reflection coefficient less than or equal -10 dB, and yields an overlapped axial ratio bandwidth of 30% from 49 to 67 GHz for the axial ratio ≤ 3 dB. The maximum gain of the antenna reaches to 15 dBic. The proposed methodology of this design can apply to applications related to mmw wireless communication systems. The ultimate goal of this paper is to develop a wideband, high-gain, and low-cost antenna for the mmw frequency band.