SANTANA- Smart Antenna Terminal Design

Abstract

This project is embedded in SANTANA (Smart Antenna Terminal) project. The project goal is to design a Ka-band circularly polarized antenna radiator for the receiver SANTANA system. The research work focuses on two types of circularly polarized antennas: aperture-coupled patch antenna and CPW-fed patch antenna. A two steps design process is used. Firstly, only the antennas and their feed structure are designed and optimized. Secondly, a via-transition to connect to a MMIC layer is added. When designing the aperture-coupled patch antenna, a simplified cavity model method for computation is used to achieve the computational model. Both of the structures are optimized. The aperture-coupled microstrip feed patch antenna is selected to fabricate, so that a transition-VIA is added to the bottom of it. After comparing simulation results and measurement results, the two types of radiators‘s different behavior can be easily observed. Also, the influences of the transition-VIA to the radiator are obviously seen.