Compact Planar 220GHz Monopulse Antenna Based on Through Glass Vias SIW Technology for Terahertz Space High Integration Tracking Application

This paper proposes a compact planar 220GHz monopulse antenna based on through glass vias SIW (TGV-SIW) technology. The TGV-SIW is composed of a glass dielectric substrate covered on both faces by a metallic layer. The glass substrate etches two parallel rows of metallic via holes delimiting the wave propagation area. The TGV-SIW technology has the advantages of low profile, low cost, and easy to process in the terahertz band. To validate experimentally the TGV-SIW technology, a monopulse antenna is designed and fabricated. The monopulse antenna consists of two layers; the upper layer is a 2 × 2 slot antenna array that functions as a four-horn feed. The lower layer is the planar sum-difference comparator, where any of the four ports is excited to produce the desired sum/difference beam form. The monopulse antenna is fabricated and measured, and the whole size including waveguide flanges is 50 × 50 × 0.508 mm (36 × 36 × 0.37 λ, λ is the free space wavelength). The simulated and measured results show that the antenna can be able to operate over 205–225 GHz, and the maximum gain with this operation frequency can be up to 27.15 dBi. The maximum null-depth is simulated to be − 42 dB. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the monopulse antenna based on through glass vias technology is the first to be proposed in the terahertz frequency band, which not only achieves a high precision capture and tracking system, but more importantly, the verification of the TGV process presents an excellent candidate for space terahertz integration.