DEVELOPMENT OF POLYMER-BASED DIELECTRIC RESONATOR ANTENNAS FOR MILLIMETER-WAVE APPLICATIONS

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to use polymer-based materials (instead of hard ceramics) in fabrication of dielectric resonator antennas at millimeter-wave frequencies. The soft nature of polymers facilitates machining of antennas, while the low permittivity of polymers naturally enhances the bandwidth. More importantly, advantageous properties (e.g., ∞exibility and photosensitivity) of some polymers introduce special capabilities which can not be achieved by ceramics. A photosensitive polymer is utilized in this paper to fabricate polymer-based resonator antennas. As a result, deep X-ray lithography is enabled to produce high quality antenna structures. The proposed dielectric resonator antennas which inherently have very low relative permittivity (usually in a range from 3 to 5) are excited efiectively using a slot-coupled feeding method and analyzed in both the frequency and time domains. Impedance and radiation properties are compared with higher permittivity ceramic antennas. Impedance bandwidths up