On-Chip mm-Wave Artificial Magnetic Conductor Backed Dipole Antenna on Low-Ohmic Substrate

The paper presents an on-chip mm-wave dipole antenna working at 61 GHz. It utilizes artificial magnetic conductor (AMC) surface to boost the gain and efficiency. It is designed for the integration on low-ohmic substrate in 22-nm FDSOI process. In order to create a fabrication tolerant AMC surface, an enhanced Jerusalem cross (JC) structure is used as a unit cell. AMC unit cell design procedure is analyzed for the low-ohmic substrate. The procedure is later used to optimize the antenna design. Deploying a 8 by 3 AMC array, 0.5 dBi antenna gain and 42% efficiency have been achieved on high conductivity substrate. Considering the importance of ground plane in on-chip antenna design, its impact on the antenna performance is also discussed. To the best of authors' knowledge, such a structure is proposed for the first time in an on-chip antenna.