A Dual-Port Leaky-Wave Array Antenna Integrated Beam-Steerable Schottky Heterodyne Receiver for Terahertz-Band Applications

This paper presents a dual-port leaky-wave array antenna integrated beam-steerable Schottky heterodyne receiver that may be attractive for terahertz (THz) sensing applications. The receiver chip features a low-cost wideband quasi-optical design that utilizes one frequency-scanning leaky-wave array and one fixed-beam monopole integrated lens antenna for efficiently coupling the radio-frequency (RF) and local-oscillator (LO) signals, respectively. Operating in the subharmonic mixing mode, a dual-channel beam-steerable Schottky heterodyne receiver circuit was designed for performance maximization via both passive and active modeling. A prototype of THz beam-steerable receiver module was manufactured and experimentally demonstrated. By flexibly switching between seven fixed LO frequencies among 99.5-114.5 GHz, the receiver can reconfigurably detect the RF signal at one of seven equally-divided sub-bands from 200 to 235 GHz, with an intermediate-frequency bandwidth up to 5 GHz. In particular, the receiver can detect the RF beam from unfixed incident direction over a wide steering coverage range of 80<sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">°</sup>. The measured average single-sideband conversion gain and noise figure are around -9.1 dB and 9.4 dB, respectively. The results have validated good receiver performance and its potential for sensing applications.