Mm-Wave Antenna in Package (AiP) Design Applied to 5th Generation (5G) Cellular User Equipment Using Unbalanced Substrate

Abstract

The mm-Wave bands defined as the new radio in the fifth generation (5G) mobile networks would decrease the dimension of the antenna into the scale of package level. In this study, a patch antenna array with stacked patches was designed for a wider operation frequency band than a typical patch. By considering a better electrical performance of the antenna in package (AiP), an unbalanced substrate of 4-layer metal stack-up within the processing capacity is proposed in this paper. The proposed unbalanced substrate structure is more elegant than the conventional substrate structure because of fewer substrate layers. The electrical and dimensional data are collected and analyzed. The designed patch antenna in this paper shows good correlations between simulations and measurements. The measured results show that the 1×4 patch array achieves a bandwidth of about 15.4 % with -10 dB return loss and gain of 10.8 dBi.