A wideband on-chip millimeter-wave patch antenna in 0.18 μm CMOS

A wideband on-chip millimeter-wave patch antenna in 0.18 μm CMOS with a low-resistivity (10 Ω·bm) silicon substrate is presented. The wideband is achieved by reducing the Q factor and exciting the high-order radiation modes with size optimization. The antenna uses an on-chip top layer metal as the patch and a probe station as the ground plane. The on-chip ground plane is connected to the probe station using the inner connection structure of the probe station for better performance. The simulated S₁₁ is less than −10 dB over 46–95 GHz, which is well matched with the measured results over the available 40–67 GHz frequency range from our measurement equipment. A maximum gain of −5.55 dBi with 4% radiation efficiency at a 60 GHz point is also achieved based on Ansoft HFSS simulation. Compared with the current state-of-the-art devices, the presented antenna achieves a wider bandwidth and could be used in wideband millimeter-wave communication and image applications. (semiconductor integrated circuits)