High-gain tapered monopulse antenna based on octuple excitation method in diffusion bonding technology at W-band

Abstract

The authors present the design, fabrication and testing of a W-band monopulse antenna. This antenna consists of three main building blocks: an array with 48 × 48 slots, a tapered corporate-feed network and a comparator. The comparator has four input ports to generate sum and difference patterns in orthogonal cardinal planes for monopulse operation. A novel octuple excitation is adopted for the corporate network to achieve a side lobe level lower than −20 dB for the sum patterns and simultaneously reduce drastically the manufacturing complexity. Diffusion bonding technology is used for fabrication. Twenty-four etched copper sheets with a thickness of 0.2 mm are stacked to realise the prototype. The total size of the antenna is $40.76\times 40.76\times 1.51{\lambda }_0^3$, with λ₀ being the wavelength at the centre frequency (94 GHz). The antenna presents an isolation better than 12 dB among the input ports in the 84–100 GHz band. The realised measured gain is 40.7 dBi at 94 GHz. The measured 3-dB gain bandwidth is 17.4%. The difference patterns at 94.0 GHz present null depths of −24.0, −18.0, −17.5, and −17.4 dB, in the E-, H-, 45°-, and 135°-planes, respectively.