Design of Substrate-Integrated Dielectric Resonator Antenna With Dielectric Vias

For the first time, dielectric vias were used to design a substrate-integrated dielectric resonator antenna (DRA). The dielectric vias consist of cylindrical holes drilled into the PCB substrate and filled with pre-sintered nanoparticles of barium strontium titanate (BST). The BST nanoparticles were found to have a dielectric constant of 20, with an approximate loss tangent of ~0.05. The dielectric-vias loaded substrate constitutes an effective medium for the DRA design. The dielectric vias are arranged in a concentric manner around a core substrate material region, giving a wideband multi-ring substrate-integrated DRA. It was found that the wideband behavior is due to two different dielectric resonator modes, namely the TE_δ11 mode and TE_δ31 half-mode. The TE_δ31 half-mode is a modified version of the TE_δ31- mode of a regular dielectric resonator and is reported here for the first time. The measured and simulated -10-dB impedance bandwidths of the DRA are 33.4% and 35.8%, respectively.