A novel kind of wideband low-profile dielectric resonator antenna suitable for beam-scanning applications

In this paper, a low-profile wideband dielectric resonator antenna (DRA) with a very compact planar size is investigated. The antenna consists of a high permittivity dielectric sheet on the top, a low permittivity substrate in the middle, and a probe feeding structure at the bottom. By digging an annular slot in the designated area of the square dielectric sheet, the resonant frequency of fundamental TE111 mode can be effectively increased to be close to the high-order TE131 mode. The two modes can be finally merged together, yielding a wide impedance bandwidth of 16.6%. Most importantly, the combination of the two modes is done on the premise of a fixed antenna planar size, which can be very compact and suitable for beam-scanning applications. A probe feeding structure is used to excite the DRA, making the antenna simple and practical to be integrated with other RF circuits. For verification, antenna prototypes with single-feed linear polarization and differential-feed dual polarization were fabricated and measured. Reasonable agreement between the measured and simulated results is observed.