Analysis of Dielectric Resonator Antenna Arrays with Supporting Perforated Rods

Arrays of dielectric resonator antenna (DRA) elements are formed from one piece of materials. Perforated bonding dielectric rods are are applied to connect the individual DRA elements and completely eliminate all the rest of the dielectric materials between the DRA elements. This technique of fabricating DRAs using perforations eliminates the need to position and bond individual DRA elements in an array. The dielectric rods have low dielectric constant and thin enough to avoid guiding waves around the design frequency of the array itself. A 4-element array is fabricated. The array is excited by narrow slots and designed to operate at 10 GHz. The performance of the 4-element prototype array with bonding rods is compared with a corresponding array without the bonding rods. Measured and simulated return loss and radiation patterns are presented for the array. Also, a larger 4times4 array is fabricated and tested. The results are presented to show the effect of the presence of the bonding rods. Parametric study on DRA height and feeding slot width is performed to achieve better matching.