Design and Implementation of a W-band 16×16-Slot Array Antenna with Low Sidelobe Level

A W-band corporate-feed 16×16-slot array antenna with low sidelobe level is designed and fabricated. The basic unit of the array is a 2×2-circular-slot subarray with step square cavities and uses an E-plane waveguide as the feeding line. An efficient method to design an unequal power-splitting ratio but equal phase (UPEP) E-plane waveguide T-junction (E-T) is proposed for constructing a 1-to-64 power-tapering feed network, which is the critical part to realize low sidelobe level. The whole array is fabricated with aluminum by milling and bonded by the vacuum brazing process. The measured results demonstrate that the array can achieve a 7.2% bandwidth with VSWR <1.5 and holistic sidelobe levels lower than -23.5dB in E-plane and H-plane from 89GHz ∼ 95.8GHz. The measured gain is higher than 31.7dBi over the working band with the antenna efficiency better than 67.5%.