A novel 94-GHz dipole bow-tie slot antenna on silicon for imaging applications

This paper presents a novel dipole bow-tie slot antenna on silicon substrate operating at 94-GHz for imaging applications. The proposed antenna consists of a differentially fed printed folded dipole cut away from the 0.2-µm aluminum above the 1.2-µm silicon dioxide (SiO2) layer built on the 380-µm thick silicon substrate. To increase the antenna impedance bandwidth, a bow-tie slot is added to the dipole slot antenna. The simulated results show that the proposed dipole bow-tie slot antenna exhibits a 5.3 GHz bandwidth starting from 90.1 GHz to 95.4 GHz with a fractional bandwidth (FBW) of about 5.7% while the dipole slot antenna has a bandwidth of 3.3 GHz starting from 92.1 GHz to 95.4 GHz with a FBW of about 3.5%. The proposed dipole bow-tie slot antenna also has a maximum realized gain of 9.7 dBi, which is better than that of the dipole slot antenna, and sidelobe levels of −9.5 dB in both principle planes compared to that of the dipole slot antenna. The proposed antenna is a good candidate for 94-GHz imaging applications.