Characterization and measurement system for advanced millimeter-wave antennas

军事和商业应用对宽带毫米波系统的需求日益增长，这在几个领域提出了许多挑战，特别是在无线电工程方面。这些挑战之一是毫米波频率的天线的设计和特性。为此，已经提出了各种设计，例如微带贴片、共面波导天线或缝隙天线。然而，这些类型的天线满足了微波频段的要求，在毫米波频段的辐射效率方面并没有提供足够的性能。这是由于带状边缘的巨大电流密度引起的导体损耗非常高，特别是在馈电网络中。作为这些设计的替代方案，我们提出了几个旨在设计新型先进毫米波天线的研究项目。在这些项目中，设计和实验表征是实现高性能的两个最关键的步骤。为此，首次采用了基于电磁场模拟的数值分析方法。虽然数值分析为设计提供了良好的指导方针，但为了准确地表征天线性能，必须进行实际的辐射方向图测量。在这种情况下，我们提出了一种毫米波天线测量装置。该测量系统主要由电波暗室、近场扫描仪和毫米波矢量网络分析仪三部分组成。前两个项目已经在我们的射频实验室中安装并可用，但第三个项目是我们的测量系统中缺失的部分。因此，在本提案中，我们要求毫米波矢量网络分析仪覆盖高达67 GHz的频率范围。

The increasing demand for broadband millimeter-wave systems for military and commercial applications has raised many challenges in several fields, particularly in radio engineering. One of these challenges is the design and characterization of antennas at mm-wave frequencies. For this purpose, various designs have been proposed, such as microstrip patches, CPW antennas, or slot antennas. However, these types of antennas, which fulfill the requirements in the microwave bands, do not offer sufficient performance in the mm-wave bands in terms of radiation efficiency. This is due to very high conductor losses arising from immense current densities at the strip edges, especially in the feeding networks. As an alternative to these designs, we have proposed several research projects that aim to design new advanced mm-wave antennas. In these projects, design and experimental characterization are the two most crucial steps for achieving high-performance. To achieve this, numerical analyses based on electromagnetic field simulations have firstly been used. Although numerical analysis provides a good guideline of the design, actual radiation pattern measurements are mandatory for accurately characterizing antenna performance. In this perspective, we propose a mm-wave antenna measurement setup. This measurement system is mainly composed of three parts: an anechoic chamber, a near-field scanner and a mm-wave vector network analyzer. The first two items are already installed and available in our RF laboratory, but the third item is the missing part of our measurement system. Therefore, in this proposal, we request a mm-wave vector network analyzer to cover a frequency range up to 67 GHz.