Development of an antenna array in silicon technology
Project description
Transceiver systems consists of antennas and/or antanna arrays, RF analog front-end electronics, (digital and software) baseband signal processing. In most systems, the antenna-arrays are implemented on PCBs while the RF electronics are integrated in (Bi)CMOSl processes. At higher frequencies (>60 GHz) it becomes possible to implement antennas on the same piece of silicon as the RF electronics, see Figure 1.
We are building RF systems directly on a chip and need help in designing novel antenna's and antenna arrays to combine with this RF system. In this Master Degree project the performance of an antenna array integrated on silicon side-to-side with the RF electronics will be investigated. The student will need to use electromagnetic simulations on several antenna array configurations and choose the most optimal one for integration. This optimum version will be taped-out for manufacturing. The manufactured antenna array will be measured on the new antenna measurement setup of the Electromagntic Department of the TUe.
Contact:
Bart Smolders (TU/e, room PT 13.33, a.b.smolders@tue.nl)
Paul van Zeijl (Zelectronix B.V, paul.van.zeijl@zelectronix.nl)