300-GHz LTCC horn antennas based on antenna-in-package technology

This paper presents 300-GHz horn antennas aiming at their integration in low-temperature co-fired ceramic (LTCC) packages. Using substrate integrated waveguide technology, we fabricated vertical horn antennas with an LTCC multi-layer process. A cavity inside the multi-layer LTCC substrate and a surrounding via fence are used to form a feeding hollow waveguide and horn structure. The prototype of the LTCC horn antenna exhibits peak gain of 16 dBi and 58-GHz bandwidth with more than 10-dB return loss. The size of the horn antenna is only 5 mm×5 mm×2.7 mm, which makes it to easy to integrate it in a compact LTCC package with an MMIC chip.