IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 59, NO. 8, AUGUST 2011 3083 [10] B. T. Perry, E. J. Rothwell, and L. L. Nagy, “Analysis of switch failures in a self-structuring antenna system,” IEEE Antennas Wireless Propag. Lett., vol. 4, pp. 68–70, 2005. Integration of Circular Polarized Array and LNA in LTCC as a 60-GHz Active Receiving Antenna Mei Sun, Ya-Qiong Zhang, Yong-Xin Guo, Muhammad Faeyz Karim, Ong Ling Chuen, and Mook Seng Leong Fig. 6. Radiation pattern of the steerable HLWA at 7.5 GHz optimized to steer the beam to: A) 0 ; B) 40 ; C) 60 . 0 0 IV. CONCLUSION Simulations show that it is possible to steer the main beam of a halfwidth leaky-wave antenna through nearly 180 by capacitively loading the free edge, and selectively switching the capacitors to ground. This may be accomplished at any frequency within the operating band of the antenna by using a binary search algorithm to locate switch states that provide an acceptable performance. It is anticipated that the antenna will be operated in one of two modes. In the first mode, appropriate switch configurations are determined prior to the operation of the antenna and stored in memory. These switch states are then recalled to place the antenna main beam along a desired angle at a certain frequency. By this technique the beam may either be scanned at a fixed frequency or kept fixed along a certain angle as the frequency is swept. In a second mode the switch states may be found in real time to respond to dynamically changing conditions. This requires a feedback mechanism (such as a measure of signal strength) and an efficient search algorithm to quickly sort through potential states. In this mode the antenna acts similar to the self-structuring antennas reported in [8]–[10]. REFERENCES [1] A. A. Oliner and K. S. Lee, “The nature of leakage from higher modes on microstrip line,” in IEEE MTT-S Int. Microw. Symp. Dig., 1986, pp. 57–60. [2] W. Menzel, “A new traveling wave antenna in microstrip,” in Proc. 8th Eur. Microw. Conf., 1978, pp. 302–306. [3] D. Sievenpiper, J. Schaffner, J. J. Lee, and S. Livingston, “A steerable leaky-wave antenna using a tunable impedance ground plane,” IEEE Antennas Wireless Propag. Lett., vol. 1, pp. 179–182, 2002. [4] D. Sievenpiper, “Forward and backward leaky wave radiation with large effective aperture from an electronically tunable textured surface,” IEEE Trans. Antennas Propag., vol. 53, no. 1, pp. 236–247, 2005. [5] C. Luxey and J. M. Laheurte, “Effect of reactive loading in microstrip leaky wave antennas,” IEEE Electron. Lett., vol. 36, no. 15, pp. 1259–1260, 2000. [6] M. Archbold, E. J. Rothwell, L. C. Kempel, and S. W. Schneider, “Beam steering of a half-width microstrip leaky-wave antenna using edge loading,” IEEE Antennas Wireless Propag. Lett., vol. 9, pp. 203–206, 2010. [7] G. M. Zelinski, G. A. Thiele, M. L. Hastriter, M. J. Havrilla, and A. J. Terzouli, “Half width leaky wave antennas,” IET Microw., Antennas Propag., vol. 1, no. 2, pp. 341–348, 2007. [8] C. M. Coleman, E. J. Rothwell, J. E. Ross, and L. L. Nagy, “Self-structuring antennas,” IEEE Antennas Propag. Mag., vol. 44, no. 3, pp. 11–22, 2002. [9] C. M. Coleman, E. J. Rothwell, and J. E. Ross, “Investigation of simulated annealing, ant-colony optimization, and genetic algorithms for self-structuring antennas,” IEEE Trans. Antennas Propag., vol. 52, no. 4, pp. 1007–1014, 2004. Abstract—A compact 60-GHz active receiving antenna array is designed and fabricated using low temperature co-fired ceramic (LTCC) technology. It integrates a 4 4 circularly polarized (CP) patch array and a 21-dB low noise amplifier (LNA) into the same package substrate. By applying a stripline sequential rotation feeding scheme the CP array exhibits a wide 2) and 3-dB axial ratio bandwidth, both impedance bandwidth (SWR over 8 GHz, as well as a beam-shaped pattern with a 3-dB beam width of 20 and a peak gain of 16.8 dBi. By applying a bond wire compensation scheme and low-loss transition optimization, the LNA is successfully integrated into the package. The final fabricated prototype measures only 13 20 1.4 mm , demonstrates the good integration performance as well as the CP polarization characteristics in measurement, and is estimated to have a peak overall gain of at least 35 dBi. Index Terms—Aperture-coupled patch antenna array, millimeter wave, sequential rotation, 60-GHz radio, LTCC, wireless personal area network, receiver front end. I. INTRODUCTION Designs towards low-cost highly-integrated 60-GHz radios have been carried out using multi-layer low temperature co-fired ceramic (LTCC) based system-in-package (SiP) technology [1]–[4]. Antenna designs are shifting from conventional discrete designs to antenna-in-package (AiP) solutions [5]–[9]. They have advantages over antenna-on-chip (AoC) solutions by providing higher gain and better package solutions [10]. The current AiP has developed from a single element to an array to achieve higher gain [11]. In addition, in view of wireless access applications the circularly-polarized (CP) property is very desirable for 60-GHz antennas. The commonly used linearly-polarized (LP) antenna necessitates rotating the transmitting and receiving antenna properly for polarization matching, particularly in the case of the line-of-sight (LOS) radio links. Using the CP antenna this problem can be mitigated while also allowing for reduction in interference from multi-path reflections. Thus many researches have been pursued on 60-GHz CP array antennas [12]–[16]. However, there is no report on the integration of the CP antenna with active circuits at 60 GHz in the package. Based on our previous preliminary results Manuscript received November 11, 2009; revised November 16, 2010; accepted November 19, 2010. Date of publication June 07, 2011; date of current version August 03, 2011. The work was supported in part by the National University of Singapore Young Investigator Award 2009 and in part by the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), Singapore. M. Sun, M. F. Karim, and L. C. Ong are with the Institute for Infocomm Research, Singapore 138632, Singapore. Y. Q. Zhang, Y. X. Guo and M. S. Leong are with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National University of Singapore, Singapore 117576, Singapore (e-mail: eleguoyx@nus.edu.sg). Color versions of one or more of the figures in this communication are available online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org. Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TAP.2011.2158781 0018-926X/$26.00 © 2011 IEEE 3084 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 59, NO. 8, AUGUST 2011 presented in [17], [18], in this communication, we report the details of the integration of the CP antenna with a low-noise amplifier (LNA) that boosts the receiving power at 60 GHz. Design of an integrated CP antenna is challenging at 60 GHz to achieve a high gain as well as wide axial ratio (AR) and impedance bandwidths. The high gain is achieved by a patch array of 4 2 4 elements. The wide AR and impedance bandwidths both are achieved by a unique stripline (SL) sequential rotation feeding scheme [17]. This feeding scheme is a well known technique to enhance AR and impedance bandwidth [19]. The antenna also features aperture-coupled topology and SL feeding structures [17]. All these make the antenna performance less sensitive to the surrounding dielectric and metal layers. They also decouple the design of the antenna from the exact physical properties of the package, simplifying simulation and modeling complexity in the antenna integration with active devices. Integration of the LNA into the package is challenging with wire bonding technology at 60 GHz. A number of studies on the electrical performance of wire-bonding interconnection have been reported for microstrip and coplanar configurations, indicating that the insertion loss for a bonding wire will be drastically increased with frequency as the bond wire acts as a series inductor [20]–[22]. The flip-chip bonding technology uses metallic bumps for device connections, which are kept small (less than 100 m) compared to the length of the bond wire. This results in better impedance matching, and reduces interconnection losses and parasitic effects of transition discontinuities in mm-wave systems [23]. The advanced ribbon or double bond wire techniques are also possible to use to decrease the bond wire inductance, where the ribbon is much more commonly used to bond mm-wave devices than double bond wires due to their complexity [20], [24]. Nonetheless, the wire-bonding technique, well established in consumer electronics, remains a very attractive solution since it is robust and inexpensive. In addition, it has the advantage of being tolerant to chip thermal expansion, an important requirement for many applications. In order to improve the high-frequency performance of a bond-wire interconnect, efforts have usually focused on reducing the length of the bond wire and also reducing the chip-to-package spacing. However, limitations in manufacturing require longer bond-wire lengths and wider chip-to-package spacing to improve the yields of mm-wave chip-package assemblies. In this communication we use a T-network bond wire compensation scheme [25] to enable a bond wire with a length of 500 m and a diameter of 50 m, to be used. This is almost a tripled length of the shortest bond wire supported by the current technology and would thus greatly improve the yield of assembly of the chip with the package. This makes our integration solution suitable for mass production. From chip-antenna interconnect aspect, low loss transitions have to be developed. In this communication, we optimize these transitions to achieve the lowest interconnection loss. In Section II we present our active circular polarized array antenna in a Ferro-A6M LTCC package with a relative dielectric constant of "r = 5:9 and a loss tangent of tan = 0:002. The design of the antenna array and the study of its integration will be done in the HFSS from Ansoft. The key integration challenges are solved by designing the bond wire compensation scheme and developing low loss transitions. A proof-of-concept prototype is finally designed. It is then fabricated and finally tested to obtain integration performance as well as polarization characteristics in Section III. Finally, Section IV concludes the communication. II. INTEGRATION OF ANTENNA AND LNA Fig. 1 shows the geometry of the 60-GHz active receiving antenna in LTCC package. It integrates the 4 2 4 antenna array presented in [17] with a LNA. As shown the package consists of five cofired Fig. 1. Geometry of the integrated array antenna with LNA (size: 13 19.85 1.4 mm ): (a) 3D top view, (b) 3D explored view, and (c) zoom in view of the transitions with a 50- dummy microstrip line on chip. 2 2 laminated ceramic layers with their thickness denoted respectively in Fig. 1(b). There are also five metallic layers. The layer M1 provides the metallization for the patch array antenna. The layer M2 provides the metallization for the antenna ground with aperture and the grounded co-planar waveguide (GCPW) for chip interconnection as well as chip DC biasing layout. The layer M3 provides the metallization for the antenna strip line feeding traces. The layer M4 provides the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 59, NO. 8, AUGUST 2011 3085 TABLE I BOND WIRE EFFECT ON jS j PERFORMANCE OF TRANSITIONS BOND WIRE EFFECT ON jS TABLE II = S j PERFORMANCE OF TRANSITIONS j j metallization for the GCPW ground, and the layer M5 the metallization for the system ground plane. The size of the whole package is 13 2 19.85 2 1.4 mm3 . Note that the active antenna features standard wire bonding to chip. A T-junction structure as shown in Fig. 1(c) is used to compensate the bond wire larger inductance at 60 GHz. This enables the longer bond wire of 500 m to be used. This also makes our integration solution suitable for mass production. The bond wire compensation will be presented in the following Section II.A. In addition, the active antenna features low loss transitions as denoted in Fig. 1(c). Their design and performance optimization will be presented in the following Section II.B. Based on the bond wire compensation and transition optimization, by using a 50- dummy microstrip line on chip as shown in Fig. 1(c) the whole receiving antenna is simulated. This will give us an idea of the effects of transitions on the integration performance. A. Bonding-Wire Compensation As shown in Fig. 1(c) we use a T-network [25] to compensate for the series inductance introduced by the bond wire. The bond wire length is fixed at 500 m to facilitate the compensation structure design. The transition 1 as shown in Fig. 1(c) is simulated, where a 50- GCPW is cascaded by a T-junction bond wire compensation line (by layers of M2 and M4) to connect to the chip 50- dummy line using bond wires. The effect of the bond wire compensation network on the electrical performance is shown in Fig. 2, where the 2-mil bond wire is used. As we can see, the matching is optimized at 60 GHz, leading to a better return loss from 9 dB to 18 dB and a reduction in insertion loss from 1.18 to 0.6 dB at this frequency. In simulation, it is also found that the bond wire length variation of 625 m will have insignificant effect on performance. Tables I and II also show the variation of the return loss and insertion loss with the bond wire diameter. As expected, with thinner bond wires the transition 1 has the worse performance, indicated by an increased insertion loss value. However, if the wire bonding condition in fabrication is limited to 1-mil, the performance is still acceptable with less stringent requirement. To study the bond wire compensation experimentally, one 1-mil bonding wire and two 1-mil bonding wires for back-to-back cases are employed as shown in Fig. 3(c). Figs. 3(a)–(b) show the measured results. It is demonstrated that the wire bondings with compensation show the better performance at 60-GHz band than their un-compensated counterparts. Also as expected the 2-wire bondings with compensation achieve the best performance in terms of matching and insertion loss. Fig. 2. Simulated results for transition 1 compared with the results without compensation (500-m long 2-mil bond wire is used): (a) jS j & jS j and (b) jS j. B. Low Loss Transitions In the integration design, attenuation caused by radiations at the discontinuities and impedance mismatch along the transmission lines and integrated devices should be minimized for power efficiency and noise performance of the mm-wave system. By properly designing the structure and placing grounding vias around the transitions, the attenuation can be remedied. In our transition 2 design, the GCPW is cascaded by a signal via and finally fed to the strip line of the antenna. Through this transition the strip line fed antenna is transformed to GCPW-fed format making it convenient for probe-touching test. Fig. 4 shows the performance of this transition. It is seen that the matching is optimized at 60 GHz, leading to a good return loss of 20 dB and insertion loss of 3086 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 59, NO. 8, AUGUST 2011 Fig. 4. Simulated results for transitions 2–4: (a) jS j & jS j and (b) jS j . Fig. 3. Measured results for bond wire compensation study (1-mil bond wires are used): (a) jS j, (b) jS j, and (c) photo of bondings. 0.28 dB. In the transition 3 design, the bond wire compensation structure is cascaded by the transition 2. This increases the insertion loss to 0.57 dB at 60 GHz with input and output matching still better than 20 dB. In the transition 4 design, the transition 1 and transition 3 combined to lead to a further increased insertion loss of 0.7 dB at 60 GHz while input and output matching still better than 20 dB. It should be noted that 0.7 dB attenuation is quite satisfactory for this complex transition with bond wires. Tables I and II also show the variation of the return loss and insertion loss with the bond wire diameter. As expected, with thinner bond wires the transitions 3 and 4 have the worse performance, indicated by an increased insertion loss value. It should be noted that the whole transition performance in some bond wire cases is better than the individual performance of its parts, owing to the global optimization. C. Integration Simulation With a dummy 50- microstrip line on chip, we evaluate the performance of the whole antenna as shown in Fig. 1. It is found from Fig. 5 that transitions degrade the impedance bandwidth. It is reduced to 16.5 GHz (53–69.5 GHz) from 18.5 GHz (51.5–70 GHz) for VSWR < 2. In addition, the peak gain is reduced from 16.8 dBi to 14.9 dBi by 1.9 dB. The 3-dB gain bandwidth remains at 10 GHz but shifts from 56.8–66.8 GHz to the lower frequency band of 54.5–64.5 GHz. The Fig. 5. Simulated performance of the integrated array antenna compared with un-integration counterpart in [17]: (a) jS j, (b) gain and axial ratio. 3-dB axial ratio bandwidth broadens from 8 GHz (55.5–63.5 GHz) to 9 GHz (54.25–63.25 GHz) due to the AR performance improvement at the lower frequency. IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 59, NO. 8, AUGUST 2011 3087 Fig. 6. Photograph of the fabricated samples for test: (a) the referenced array antenna without amplifier and (b) the active array antenna with amplifier. Fig. 7. Antenna test set up: (a) pattern measurement and (b) polarization study. III. ANTENNA TESTING The active antenna is tested by comparison with a counterpart sample without LNA. The CP array without LNA was fabricated as shown in Fig. 6(a). Note that the GCPW-SL transition is used in this sample to facilitate testing. In simulation, it is found that GCPW-SL transition does not obviously degrade the antenna performance except for a 0.6-dB peak gain penalty (from 16.8 dBi to 16.2 dBi). The antennas were tested by Agilent E8361A vector network analyzer (VNA) up to a frequency of 67 GHz. A GSG RF probe with a pitch of 250 m was touched on the GCPW line of the antenna for testing. The antenna patterns were measured with the set up at the National University of Singapore as shown in Fig. 7(a). With proper probe touching, the tested antenna senses the radiation in the boresight direction from a WR-15 standard pyramidal horn antenna. The horn antenna has an aperture size of 13 2 10 mm2 and a gain of 15 dBi. The far field region limit of the horn antenna can be calculated as 2 2 0 10 8 cm, where is the largest dimension of the horn and 0 is the free space wavelength. The distance between the horn aperture and the antenna under test is set around 15 cm. Fig. 8 shows the simulated and measurement results for the antenna without LNA. It is found from Fig. 8(a) that the antenna has a wide impedance matching bandwidth larger than 8 GHz, which is 11.5 GHz 2. If there was no measured hump from 50.5–62 GHz for SWR around 63.5 GHz, the bandwidth would be even larger. The occurrence of the hump enlightens us to improve our basic array matching performance to eliminate this hump by optimizing the antenna dimensions as shown in Fig. 5(a). Fig. 8(b) shows a measured peak gain 16 dBi over 60 GHz band. Fig. 8(c) also confirms the good 3-dB AR bandwidth performance in measurement. Figs. 8(d)–(f) present the measured patterns in the upper half-plane. A 21-dB Low noise amplifier (LNA), HMC-ALH382 [26] is used in the finally fabricated active antenna. The amplifier die has a size of 1.55 2 0.73 2 0.1 mm3 with pads laid out as illustrated in Fig. 1 to facilitate the wire bonding. Fig. 6(b) shows the photograph of the final fabricated active antenna for measurement. It measures only 13 2 20 2 1.4 mm3 . The active antenna was also measured with a D = : D < > Fig. 8. Measured and simulated performance for the antenna without LNA: (a) jS j, (b) peak gain, (c) axial ratio at the main radiation direction, and xz-plane & yz-plane radiation patterns at (d) 57 GHz, (e) 60 GHz, and (f) 64 GHz. VNA analyzer. Another DC probe was touched to provide a biasing drain voltage of +2 5 V and a gate voltage of 00 3 V. A total 64 mA : : 3088 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 59, NO. 8, AUGUST 2011 Fig. 9. Measured jS j for the antenna with LNA. Fig. 10. Measured jS j for the antenna with and without LNA (0 position: E field of horn in the y -direction, and 90 position: E field of horn is in the xdirection). drain current was thus obtained in the measurement. Fig. 9 shows a measured bandwidth of 4.3 GHz (60.7–65 GHz) for SWR < 2. Finally, the set up as shown in Fig. 7(b) is used to study the polarization characteristics of the antenna. The horn antenna is placed on the top of the AUT antenna. The apertures of the two antennas are both paralleled to the xy-plane. The tests are then conducted with horn at 0 position (E field of horn is in the y - direction) and 90 position (E field of horn is in the x- direction), respectively. Fig. 10 shows the measured transmission performance. The circularly polarized characteristics are observed with both transmission coefficients at 0 and 90 positions having the similar amplitude. In addition, compared with the transmission coefficients measured in the case of without amplifier, those measured with amplifier show an average increase of approximately 19 dB from 60.7–65 GHz, which is very close to the amplifier gain value of 21 dB deducted by a 1.9-dB loss. Based on the above, the final estimated peak gain of the active antenna is at least 35 dBi. IV. CONCLUSION A wideband circular polarized patch array of 4 2 4 elements was integrated with a 21-dB LNA to form a compact 60-GHz active receiving antenna, where the low loss transition structures were optimized and the bond wire compensations were used to improve the performance of the 60-GHz chip-package interconnection. The fabricated active antenna prototype measures only 13 2 20 2 1.4 mm3 . The antenna test was finally conducted to study antenna performance. The wide impedance bandwidth was confirmed by measurement. The circularly polarized characteristic was also observed. The final estimated peak gain of the active antenna is at least 35 dBi. The designed active receiving antenna will find application in the 60-GHz wireless personal area network. REFERENCES [1] S. K. Moore, “Cheap chips for next wireless frontier,” IEEE Spectrum, pp. 8–9, Jun. 2006. [2] A. Yamada, E. Suematsu, K. Sato, M. Yamamoto, and H. Sato, “60 GHz ultra compact transmitter/receiver with a low phase noise PLLoscillator,” in IEEE MTT-S Int. Microwave Symp. Digest, Jun. 2003, vol. 3, pp. 2035–2038. [3] R. R. Tummala, M. Swaminathan, M. M. Tentzeris, J. Laskar, G.-K. Chang, S. Sitaraman, D. Keezer, D. Guidotti, Z. R. Huang, K. Lim, L. X. Wan, S. K. Bhattacharya, V. Sundaram, F. H. Liu, and P. M. Raj, “The SOP for miniaturized, mixed-signal computing, communication, and consumer systems of the next decade,” IEEE Trans. Adv. Packag., vol. 27, no. 2, pp. 250–267, May 2004. [4] Y. C. Lee, W. Chang, and C. S. Park, “Monolithic LTCC SiP transmitter for 60 GHz wireless communication terminals,” in IEEE MTT-S Int. Microwave Symp. Dig., Long Beach, CA, Jun. 12–17, 2005, pp. 1015–1018. [5] U. Pfeiffer, J. Grzyp, D. Liu, B. Gaucher, T. Beukema, B. Floyd, and S. Reynolds, “A chip-scale packaging technology for 60-GHz wireless chipsets,” IEEE Trans. Microw. Theory Tech., vol. 54, no. 8, pp. 3387–3397, Aug. 2006. [6] D. Liu and B. Gaucher, “Design consideration for millimetre wave antennas within a chip package,” in Proc. of IEEE Int. Workshop on Antenna Technology, Xiamen, China, Apr. 21–23, 2007, pp. 13–16. [7] Y. P. Zhang, M. Sun, K. M. Chua, L. L. Wai, and D. Liu, “Integration of slot antenna in LTCC package for 60-GHz radios,” Electron. Lett., vol. 44, no. 5, pp. 330–331, Mar. 2008. [8] M. Sun, Y. P. Zhang, K. M. Chua, L. L. Wai, D. Liu, and B. Gaucher, “Integration of Yagi antenna in LTCC package for differential 60-GHz radio,” IEEE Trans. Antennas Propag., vol. 56, no. 8, pp. 2780–2783, Aug. 2008. [9] B. Pan, Y. Li, G. E. Ponchak, J. Papapolymerou, and M. M. Tentzeris, “A 60-GHz CPW-Fed high-gain and broadband integrated horn antenna,” IEEE Trans. Antennas Propag., vol. 57, no. 4, pp. 1050–1056, Apr. 2009. [10] Y. P. Zhang, M. Sun, and L. H. Guo, “On-chip antennas for 60-GHz radios in silicon technology,” IEEE Trans. Electron Devices, vol. 52, no. 7, pp. 1664–1668, 2005. [11] A. E. I. Lamminen, J. Säily, and A. R. Vimpari, “60 GHz patch antennas and arrays on LTCC with embedded-cavity substrates,” IEEE Trans. Antennas Propag., vol. 56, no. 9, pp. 2865–2874, Sept. 2008. [12] D. Nesic, A. Nesic, and V. Brankovic, “Circular polarized printed antenna with broadband axial ratio,” presented at the IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society Int. Symp., 2003. [13] H. Uchimura, N. Shino, and K. Miyazato, “Novel circular polarized antenna array substrates for 60 GHz-band,” in IEEE MTT-S Int. Microwave Symp. Dig., Long Beach, CA, Jun. 12–17, 2005, pp. 1875–1878. [14] S. Pinel, II, K. Kim, K. Yang, and J. Laskar, “60 GHz linearly and circularly polarized antenna arrays on liquid crystal polymer substrate,” in Proc. 3rd Eur. Micro-Wave Conf., 2006. [15] N. Caillet, S. Pinel, C. Quendo, C. Person, E. Rius, J.-F. Favennec, and J. Laskar, “A wideband circularly polarized patch array for V-band low-cost applications,” presented at the Asia-Pacific Microwave Conf., Dec. 11–14, 2007. [16] R. G. Zhou, D. X. Liu, and H. Xin, “Design of circularly polarized antenna for 60 GHz wireless communications,” in Proc. 3rd Eur. Conf. on Antennas and Propagation (EuCAP 2009), Mar. 23–27, 2009, pp. 3787–3789. [17] M. Sun, Y. X. Guo, M. F. Karim, and L. C. Ong, “Integrated 60-GHz LTCC circularly polarized antenna array,” presented at the IEEE Radio-Frequency Integration Technology (RFIT) Conf., Singapore, Dec. 9–11, 2009. [18] M. Sun, Y. P. Zhang, L. C. Ong, Y. X. Guo, and M. F. Karim, “Integration of linearly- and circularly-polarized arrays in packages for 60-GHz radios in LTCC technology,” presented at the Eur. Conf. on Antennas and Propagation, Barcelona, Spain, Apr. 12–16, 2010. [19] J. R. James and P. S. Hall, Handbook of Microstrip Antennas. London, U.K.: Peter Peregrinus, 1989. [20] R. H. Caverly, “Characteristic impedance of integrated circuit bond wires,” IEEE Trans. Microw. Theory Tech., vol. 34, no. 9, pp. 982–984, Sep. 1986. [21] G. Baumann et al., “51 GHz frontend with flip chip and wire bond interconnections from GaAs MMICs to a planar patch antenna,” in IEEE MTT-S Int. Microwave Symp. Dig., Orlando, FL, May 16–20, 1995, pp. 1639–1642. [22] T. Krems, W. Haydl, H. Massler, and J. Rudiger, “Millimeter-wave performance of chip interconnections using wire bonding and flip chip,” in IEEE MTT-S Int. Microwave Symp. Dig., San Francisco, CA, Jun. 17–21, 1996, pp. 247–250. IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 59, NO. 8, AUGUST 2011 3089 [23] G. Felic and E. Skafidas, “Flip-chip interconnection effects on 60 GHz microstrip antenna performance,” IEEE Antennas Wireless Propag. Lett., vol. 8, pp. 283–286, May 2009. [24] S. T. Choi, K. S. Yang, K. Tokuda, and Y. H. Kim, “60 GHz transceiver module with coplanar ribbon bonded planar millimeter-wave bandpass filter,” Microw. Opt. Technol. Lett., vol. 49, no. 5, pp. 1212–1214, 2007. [25] Y. Sun, S. Glisic, F. Herzel, K. Schmalz, E. Grass, W. Winkler, and R. Kraemer, “An integrated 60 GHz transceiver front end for OFDM in SiGe: BiCMOS,” presented at the Wireless World Research Forum 16, Shanghai, China, Apr. 26–28, 2006. [26] [Online]. Available: http://www.hittite.com/content/documents/data_ sheet/hmc-alh382.pdf Fig. 1. Geometry and notations of the problem. The curve line indicates the branch cut in real space due to CSP oriented to radiate at ' . = 180 Two-Shell Radially Symmetric Dielectric Lenses as Low-Cost Analogs of the Luneburg Lens where R is the lens radius, or its discrete analog for the uniformlylayered LL A. V. Boriskin, A. Vorobyov, and R. Sauleau "n = 2 Abstract—This communication provides guidelines for the design of twoshell radially symmetric dielectric lenses with collimating capabilities compatible with those of the classical Luneburg lens. Unlike earlier publications, it is demonstrated that such a lens can be designed using any standard low permittivity dielectric materials, provided the optimal shell thickness is selected. The lens characteristics are studied in 2-D formulation using exact series representation. A detailed description is given for lenses with and core made of Rexolite. The design recommendations radius of 10 and cores made of are then generalized for lenses with radii of 5 to 15 Teflon, Fused Silica and Quartz. Finally, a chart defining the optimal shell thickness for lenses made of two arbitrary dielectric materials is provided. Validity of the recommendations for design of 2-D and 3-D radially symmetric lenses is proven by comparison with optimal designs reported by other authors. Index Terms—Dielectric lens, lens antennas, luneburg lens. I. INTRODUCTION A radially symmetric dielectric lens capable of collecting rays in a focus on its rear surface is an attractive solution for many applications from microwave to optical ranges [1]–[10]. Such a lens, known as the Luneburg lens (LL) [11], can be designed as a radially inhomogeneous or multi-shell sphere, e.g., [2], [5], [12]. A critical aspect in the design of multi-shell LLs is the limited number of available low-loss dielectric materials whose permittivity belongs to the range of 1–2, as suggested by the ray-optics focusing rule "(r ) = 2 0 r 2 ; R r 2 [0; R] (1) Manuscript received September 20, 2010; revised November 14, 2010; accepted December 13, 2010. Date of publication June 07, 2011; date of current version August 03, 2011. This work was supported in part by the Université Européenne de Bretagne, France, by the ESF in the framework of the RNP-NEWFOCUS, by the Fondation Michel Métivier, and in part by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization under Grant RIG983313. A.V. Boriskin is with the Institute of Radiophysics and Electronics NASU, Kharkov, Ukraine, and also with the Institute of Electronics and Telecommunications of Rennes (IETR), UMR CNRS 6164, University of Rennes 1, Rennes, France (e-mail: artem.boriskin@ieee.org). A. Vorobyov and R. Sauleau are with the Institute of Electronics and Telecommunications of Rennes (IETR), UMR CNRS 6164, University of Rennes 1, Rennes, France. Color versions of one or more of the figures in this communication are available online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org. Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TAP.2011.2158793 0 (n 0 0:5) N 2 ; n = 1; . . . ; N (2) where "n is permittivity of the n-th layer and N is the total number of layers (n = 1 corresponds to the most inner layer). There are well known ways to fabricate artificial materials with desired properties via milling holes or adding compounding materials, e.g., [13]–[15]. Nevertheless each of them increases complexity and cost of the technology especially for multi-shell lenses. Therefore a favorable solution for low-cost radially symmetric lenses is a single- or double-shell design with layers made of the available low-loss dielectric materials, e.g., [1], [3], [4], [6], [12]. As demonstrated in [12], the minimum number of layers needed to provide the collimating capabilities compatible to those of a classical LL is two. The optimal design for the two-shell lens, found in [12] using global optimization technique, is a dense quartz-like core covered with a quarter-wavelength matching layer. Such a design exhibits critical drawbacks, namely: increased overall weight, difficulties in fabrication and further exploitation of a fragile matching layer, and finally involvement of the whispering gallery (WG) modes whose impact on the antenna characteristics grows rapidly with increase of the dielectric contrast on the shell boundaries [16]. In this communication we demonstrate that a two-shell lens with desired collimating capabilities can be designed using any standard low permittivity dielectric materials. We also present a chart with tabulated data generated from many simulation cycles that enables one to determine the optimal parameters of a two-shell lens made of two arbitrary dielectric materials without solving the corresponding diffraction problem. The communication is built as follows. After a brief outline of the solution given in Section II, a Rexolite-core lens illuminated by a wave beam is studied in detail in Section III-A. Then the impacts of the lens size, feed location and core material are investigated in Sections III-B–III-D, respectively. Finally, conclusions are outlined in Section IV. II. OUTLINE OF THE SOLUTION We consider the problem in two-dimensional (2-D) formulation and model the lens as a multi-shell circular dielectric cylinder (Fig. 1). To study its collimating capabilities, the lens is illuminated by a wave beam radiated by a complex-source point (CSP) feed, i.e., a line current located in a point with a complex coordinate. In real space such a feed radiates a beam whose waist is controlled by the value of the imaginary part of its coordinate, b [17]. 0018-926X/$26.00 © 2011 IEEE