Miniaturized broadband monopole antenna in 130nm CMOS with gain improvement

Abstract

This paper presents a miniaturized broadband monopole AOC (antenna on chip) for W-band. The AOC miniaturization is achieved by a hexagonal grid at the top layer M6 and a capacitive AMC (artificial magnetic conductor) at the bottom layer M1 based on a 130nm CMOS process. First, the reflection phase of different modes is analyzed using electromagnetics simulation. Secondly, the axial size of the AOC with AMC is further reduced by 16.2% (compared to a straight monopole antenna with AMC) by using a hexagonal grid, and the impedance is optimized by analyzing the grid angle. The proposed miniaturized monopole antenna has the size of 367um×194.2um (0.1λ₀×0.052λ₀) at 81GHz. Measurements show that the antenna has an impedance bandwidth of 31.5% (75-103GHz) and a peak gain of -0.35dBi at 85GHz. The proposed antenna has the smallest reported size and can be applied to W-band FMCW radar system on chip.