Article ID: 14.20170836
This paper presents an on-chip antenna integrated with a Ku-band transceiver using a standard 0.18-µm CMOS process. An off-chip guard ring is used to improve the gain of the antenna. As the guard ring is implemented on the test carrier board, this gain improvement technology does not require additional process, and it is easy to implement. It is shown that, a gain improvement of 5.8 dBi can be obtained by using the guard ring with the radiation efficiency improved from 18% to 32%. Additionally, the influence of the CMOS process metal rules and the existence of the transceiver on the antenna performance are studied in this paper. The proposed antenna is fabricated with and without the transceiver, respectively. It is shown that the single-chip antenna (without transceiver) has a gain of 2.4 dBi at 17 GHz, with a 3-dB bandwidth from 14.2 GHz to 21.5 GHz. Meanwhile, the transceiver (with integrated antenna) has a 3-dB bandwidth from 15.8 GHz to 18.0 GHz, with a peak gain of 13.5 dB in the transmitter link and a peak gain of 15.3 dB in the receiver link.
