Fabrication of a Slotted-Waveguide Antenna Based on Gap Waveguide Technology at 440 GHz

摘要

A 440 GHz 4x4 slotted-waveguide Antenna fabrication procedure approximation is presented in this paper. The antenna feeding network is based in Groove Gap Waveguide (GGW) technology. The fabrication is intended to be done with Deep Reactive Ion Etching (DRIE) Bosch process in Silicon for the GGW feeding network and Wet Etching also in Silicon for the slots. The resultant slots are in fact tapered apertures with a fixed 54.7° taper angle. The antenna topology is selected to reduce propagation losses inherent to sub-millimetre wave frequencies and the fabrication procedure takes advantage of the silicon etching capabilities we have at Public University of Navarra ISO 7 clean room facility. Wet etching of the 4x4 slot array is selected so as to avoid extremely thin silicon top layer that could bend and ruin alignment efforts. These tapered slots aperture has in fact improved gain and matching of the whole antenna. Also, the GGW feeding network has been redesigned to simplify DRIE manufacturing so as to include only two different etch depths.