A Ceramic Monoblock Open-Ended Dielectric Waveguide Antenna Array for 5G Millimeter-Wave Wireless Communication

In this paper, a ceramic monoblock open-ended dielectric waveguide antenna (OEDWA) array operating in the 5G millimeter-wave band is designed. Array element comprises two parts: a feeding section and a ceramic monoblock section. The feeding section is a coaxialline-to-TEM horn, and the TEM horn antenna is plated with gold on the surface of the dielectric to achieve miniaturization. The beams on both sides of the horn have little impact on the radiation performance, and can fix the array element on the metal plate. The OEDWA and the two beams are made of the same dielectric material, therefore, they can be integrally designed. The ceramic monoblock section is excited by a TEM horn antenna through a low dielectric constant dielectric waveguide (DW), forming OEDWA, which matching the radiating section with the air directly. In addition, OEDWA is an excellent array element with broadband matching, low sidelobe levels, and high directionality. DWs transmit in the form of surface waves, achieving high isolation between array elements. The n-element linear array ceramic monoblock can be designed by fixing it to the bottom plate. And then, the large-scale antenna array is composed of m rows of n-element linear array elements. Finally, a <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">${2}\times {2}$</tex> array is selected as a validation example, which has a matching bandwidth from 24 to 26GHz with the voltage standing wave rate <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$({VSWR}) \leq {2}$</tex> and the realized gain ranges from 15.7 to 16.5dBi.