An Electrical-Contactless Substrate-Over-Waveguide Planar Array Slot Antenna

A novel design of substrate-over-waveguide (SOW) planar array 6×12 slot antenna is simulated and presented. It consists of 6 linear arrays fed by conventional waveguide technology. For bandwidth improvement, the 12-slot arrays are fed in the middle to form two 1×6 slot arrays. The upper face of the waveguide is not closed. Instead, a Rogers RO3003 (ε
_r
=3 and tanδ = 0.0010) substrate is placed above, with no electrical contact between the substrate copper foil (where the radiating slots (RS) are printed) and the waveguide network. The coupling between waveguides is avoided by a counter-phase-fed scheme. This scheme is performed by a transition composed of counter-phase coupling slots (CP-CS) located in the lower face of the waveguide network. These coupling slots in turn are fed by a corporate waveguide feeding network (CWFN) placed below the antenna. Therefore, fabrication process is enhanced, eliminating possible electrical bad contacts between substrate and waveguide layers. All the designs within this paper work in 34-36 GHz band for radar applications. CST Studio Suite Transient Solver is used to simulation process. Some prototypes will be manufactured and measured with the fabrication processes discussed in this paper.