Recent development of millimeter-wave magneto-electric dipole

The magneto-electric dipole was developed based on the idea of combining an electric dipole with a magnetic dipole to achieve a symmetrical radiation pattern with low back radiation. The idea is not new but all the antenna structures reported in the literature developed by this complementary antenna or Huygen´s source concept are not very wideband in bandwidth and confined with linear polarization. However, it was demonstrated that by combining a directed dipole with an L-probe fed quarter-wave patch antenna, a wideband unidirectional antenna element with 50% bandwidth, almost constant gain and beamwidth over operating frequencies, and stable radiation patterns with low back radiation can be achieved. More importantly, this magneto-electric dipole antenna can be generalized with dual-polarization or circular polarization radiation, ultrawide band performance and differential feed structure, to fulfill the needs of modern wireless applications. For high speed wireless data transfer, new communication systems operated at the 60 GHz band were proposed. This provides driving forces for developing high gain planar antenna arrays to combat the high propagation loss at such high millimeter wave frequencies. Over the past decade, a number of 60GHz printed antenna arrays were proposed in the literature. These antennas are mainly built by LTCC technology, which is expensive. In this talk, the development of low-cost millimeter wave printed antenna arrays with linear and circular polarizations based on the magneto-electric dipole will be reported. It will be demonstrated that by using a novel CPW feed network, a printed magneto-electric dipole antenna arrays can be realized on a single-layer printed circuit board which can reduce the fabrication and material costs dramatically. Possible future development of the magneto-electric dipole will also be discussed in the talk.