DESIGN AND FABRICATION OF A SECTORAL BEAM SLOTTED ANTENNA IN SIW TECHNOLOGY FOR SURVEILLANCE APPLICATIONS AT MILLIMETER WAVES

In this paper, we present the design and fabrication of a sectoral beam slotted antenna in substrate integrated waveguide (SIW) technology able to achieve a high roll-off sectoral pattern in the horizontal plane and a very narrow beam in the vertical plane, as required in surveillance applications in the band 76–77 GHz. The proposed antenna is designed and fabricated in multi-layer PCB technology, which allows to integrate both the corporate feeding network and the radiating aperture in the same planar and lightweight device. To achieve a remarkable roll-off (> 5.5 dB/deg) and a reduced ripple (< 1.5 dB), the antenna has been designed by synthesizing a sinc-shaped (uniform) aperture distribution along x-direction (y-direction). The synthesis and optimization of so tapered aperture distributions is not easy to be found in the literature, especially for planar devices. A prototype of such an antenna has been fabricated with a horizontal half-power beamwidth (HPBW) of 30◦, by embedding both the feeding network and the radiating aperture in three stacked dielectric substrates. Measurements of the prototype show a fair agreement with numerical simulations.