Wideband high-gain millimetre/submillimetre wave antenna using additive manufacturing

This paper presents a novel design of a wideband high-gain resonant cavity antenna (RCA) for millimetre and

submillimetre wave bands, and its fabrication using additive manufacturing. The proposed RCA antenna consists of a partially

reflecting surface and three impedance matching layers fed by a waveguide. Additive manufacturing (AM) techniques are

utilized to fabricate the design operating at 30 GHz. Two fabrication techniques are assessed for printing the antenna. The

first technique is based on printing a dielectric material and fully coating the parts with a metallic layer, while the second

technique involves printing the parts in a single process using metal 3D printing. The first technique offers a lightweight

solution while the second technique can print the whole model in one run. The antenna design is investigated by both

simulations and experiments. The measured results show an 3dB gain bandwidth of about 10%, and high gain over 15 dBi

for all the three resulting antennas. Good agreement between simulation and measurement is obtained. The antenna has a

low cost and achieved good performance in terms of wide bandwidth and high gain, thus it is potentially useful for highspeed

wireless communications at millimetre-wave and sub-millimetre-wave frequencies.