On-Chip Antennas for 60-GHz Radios in Silicon Technology

The recent advances in 60-GHz radios have called for the parallel development of compact and efficient millimeter-wave antennas. This brief addresses for the first time the design, fabrication, and characterization of on-chip inverted-F and quasi-Yagi antennas for 60-GHz radios. The design was made using the Zeland IE3D software package. The fabrication was realized with the back-end-of-line process of silicon substrates of low resistivity 10 /spl Omega//spl middot/cm. The characterization was conducted on wafer with Cascade Microtech coplanar probes and an HP8510XF network analyzer. The results show that the inverted-F antenna achieved a minimum return loss of 32 dB and a gain of -19 dBi at 61 GHz; while the quasi-Yagi antenna achieved a minimum return loss of 6.75 dB and a gain of -12.5 dBi at 65 GHz. Good agreement has been observed between the measured and simulated results.