A Fully Additive Manufactured D-Band SIW Antenna

This paper presents a D-band horn antenna designed using the substrate integrated waveguide (SIW) technique. The horn's flare can be adjusted by controlling the substrate thickness using an additive manufacturing process. To increase the antenna directivity, a dielectric loading and two-element stacking are employed. Additionally, the metal vias for conventional SIW can be replaced with solid metal walls to reduce leakage loss. The antenna has wideband impedance bandwidth over the full D band. Through simulation, we have achieved a gain higher than 7 dBi over the operating band. A SIW-to-waveguide transition is integrated into the single-layer design for ease of measurement. The resultant antenna shows good dimensional accuracy with the smallest feature size of less than 0.2 mm. This study is the first demonstration that the additive manufacturing process can produce D-band integrated antennas for system-in-package (SiP) applications while providing end-fire radiation capabilities.