Wideband High-Efficiency Slot Array Antenna Based on Gap Waveguide Single-Layer Feeding Network

A single-layer, full metal, wideband and high efficiency slot array antenna operating in V-band (50-75 GHz) is proposed using single corporate-feeding network based on gap waveguide (GW) technology. Compared with conventional multi layered slot array antenna, the proposed antenna utilizes only one waveguide feeding layer excites the radiation slots, therefore the assembly complexity of multi-layer waveguide and manufacturing cost is greatly decreased. The proposed 16 × 16 slot array antenna consists of four 64 element smaller array antennas in which all radiation slots are fed by E-plane groove gap waveguide (EGGW). Power division in each of the 8×8 element array antenna is realized by a wideband combined ridge and EGGW power divider. Two wideband E-plane groove gap waveguide T-junctions have been used to connect all four 64 element sub-array antennas with proper phase and equal amplitude together to obtain higher gain. The final 16 × 16 slot array antenna has a peak gain of 32 dBi gain and about 36% impedance bandwidth at V-band. Also, the full metal antenna array has an average efficiency of 80 % over the entire bandwidth of 50-72GHz.