A Wide-Scanning Evanescent Mode Waveguide Array with Enhanced Thermal Performance

In this paper, an evanescent mode waveguide antenna array is proposed for millimeter-wave array applications. The metal nature of the array allows to overcome the thermal issues currently present in millimeter-wave array applications caused by the high-density integration of low-efficiency electronics. The proposed antenna array achieves a thermal resistance of 11.11 K/W, more than an order of magnitude lower than that of a more conventional patch antenna array (123.3 K/W), demonstrating a significant improvement in thermal performance. Additionally, the proposed antenna array also shows wide scanning capabilities with a scanning range of 116° along the H-plane and 96° along the E-plane at 28 GHz. The performance of the proposed antenna array is evaluated using simulation results and validated through real-life measurements of an <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$8 \times 8$</tex> array prototype.