300-GHz Step-Profiled Corrugated Horn Antennas Integrated in LTCC

This paper presents 300-GHz step-profiled corrugated horn antennas, aiming at their integration in low-temperature co-fired ceramic (LTCC) packages. Using substrate integrated waveguide technology, the cavity inside the multi-layer LTCC substrate and a surrounding via fence are used to form a feeding hollow waveguide and horn structure. Owing to the vertical configuration, we were able to design the corrugations and stepped profile of horn antennas to approximate smooth metallic surface. To verify the design experimentally, the LTCC waveguides and horn antennas were fabricated with an LTCC multi-layer process. The LTCC waveguide exhibits insertion loss of 0.6 dB/mm, and the LTCC horn antenna exhibits 18-dBi peak gain and 100-GHz bandwidth with more than 10-dB return loss. The size of the horn antenna is only 5×5×2.8 mm³, which makes it easy to integrate it in LTCC transceiver modules.