On-chip micromachined dipole antenna with parasitic radiator for mm-wave wireless systems

In this paper, we present a micromachined dipole antenna with parasitic radiator. The antenna is designed for operation at 60 GHz. It consists of two Ig/2 dipole radiators fed by coplanar strips waveguide. Two slightly shorter dipoles are placed in proximity to the main radiators. They act as parasitic dipole arms which increase the bandwidth of the antenna. Two versions of the same antenna topology are presented in this paper in which one uses a high resistivity silicon substrate while the other uses a low resistivity one. The proposed antenna was optimized using HFSS and the final design was simulated using both HFSS and CST for verifying the obtained results. Both simulators are in good agreement. They show that the antenna has very good radiation characteristics where its directivity is around 7.5 dBi. The addition of the parasitic arms increased the bandwidth of the antenna from 1.3 GHz (3.62 GHz) to 4.3 GHz (7.44 GHz) when designed on high (low) resistivity silicon substrate.