Low-Cost Wideband mm-Wave Phased Array Using the Piezoelectric Transducer for 5G Applications

This paper presents a 55-65 GHz 16-element beam-steering array with a low-cost piezoelectric transducer-controlled phase shifter employing a single printed circuit board substrate. An ultrawideband antipodal fermi tapered slot antenna element with sine corrugation is designed to achieve symmetric E- and H-plane radiation patterns. The array is fed with an amplitude taper wideband Y-junction power divider integrated with an electromagnetic bandgap structure surrounding the feeding network. The measured results show a wide impedance bandwidth of S11 <; -10 dB covering the band 55-65 GHz. The array measured gain is around 20 dB with low radiation losses. The 60-GHz phased array's wide BW coverage, high gain, low feeding network loss, low cost, and low profile should have wide applications in the development of ultrawideband millimeter-wave scanning systems for the fifth generation communication applications.