Investigation on Different Array Configurations of Microstrip Antenna at 28 GHz

This article presents a 5G mm-wave rectangular microstrip patch antenna that operates at 28 GHz and examines the impact of gain variation as the number of antenna elements increases. The antenna has a 6×6×1.6 mm<sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">3</sup> footprint and operates in the 28 GHz frequency band (26.78-29.7 GHz) with an impedance bandwidth of 3 GHz (⩽ -10 dB). The patch is 4.6×1.9 mm<sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> in length and width. Throughout the experiment, a typical FR-4 material with a substrate thickness of 1.6 mm and a dielectric constant of 4.4 is taken into consideration. The multiple array antenna elements are used to examine the gain increase technique. Experiments with a 2×2, 4×4, and 8×8 antenna array have shown that the gain of the antenna is significantly increased by increasing the number of radiators. The single antenna element has a gain of 7.58 dB. The antenna's gain rises to 13, 18, and 25 dB in various array configurations as the number of array elements increases.