An SICL-Fed Compact Magnetoelectric Dipole Antenna for 5G Millimeter Wave Bands

A compact magnetoelectric (ME) dipole antenna element is proposed for design of wide beam steering arrays in the 5G millimeter wave (mm-wave) bands n257, n258 and n261. The antenna employs an substrate integrated coaxial line (SICL) based feed. The SICL line is transformed into a coplanar waveguide (CPW) to enable feed for ME dipole antenna. With adoption of a U-shaped shorting strip and SICL-CPW-based feed, the element achieves an -10 dB impedance bandwidth (IBW) of 22.4% at the center frequency (f(0)) of 26.8 GHz. Notably, the antenna offers similar to 100 degrees of 3 dB beamwidth and a compact size of 0.32 lambda(0) x 0.32 lambda(0), where lambda(0) is free space wavelength at f(0). Using full-wave simulations, an 8-element uniform linear array (ULA) is shown to exhibit fractional IBW of 19%, max gain > 15 dBi with large beam steering angles up to 56 degrees. The antenna can be easily fabricated using standard four layer printed circuit board (PCB) technology on Rogers 5880 dielectric laminates.