A Dual-Port Leaky-Wave Array Antenna Integrated Beam-Steerable Schottky Heterodyne Receiver for Terahertz-Band Applications

This article presents a dual-port leaky-wave array antenna integrated beam-steerable Schottky heterodyne receiver that may be attractive for terahertz (THz) sensing applications. The receiver chip features a low-cost wideband quasi-optical design that utilizes one frequency-scanning leaky-wave array and one fixed-beam monopole integrated lens antenna for efficiently coupling the radio-frequency (RF) and local-oscillator (LO) signals, respectively. Operating in the subharmonic mixing mode, a dual-channel beam-steerable Schottky heterodyne receiver circuit was designed for performance maximization via both passive and active modeling. A prototype of the THz beam-steerable receiver module was manufactured and experimentally demonstrated. By flexibly switching between seven fixed LO frequencies among 99.5–114.5 GHz, the receiver can reconfigurably detect the RF signal at one of seven equally-divided sub-bands from 200 to 235 GHz, with an intermediate-frequency bandwidth up to 5 GHz. In particular, the receiver can detect the RF beam from unfixed incident direction over a wide steering coverage range of 80°. The measured average single-sideband conversion gain and noise figure are around −9.1 and 9.4 dB, respectively. The results have validated good receiver performance and its potential for sensing applications.