A post-wall center-feed waveguide consisting of T-junctions is proposed for reducing the slot-free area of a parallel plate slot array antenna. The width of the slot-free area is reduced from 2.6 λ0 to 2.1 λ0. A sidelobe level in the E-plane is expected to be suppressed lower than that of the conventional center-feed antenna using cross-junctions. The method of moments with solid-wall replacement designs initially the T-junctions and HFSS including the post surfaces modifies only the reflection cancelling post. We have designed and fabricated a 61.25 GHz model antenna with uniform aperture illumination. The sidelobe level in the E-plane is suppressed to -9.5 dB while that of a conventional cross-junction type is -7.8 dB. Also, we suppress it to -13.8 dB by introducing a -8.3 dB amplitude tapered distribution in the array of the radiation slot pairs.

This letter reports a high-performance Ka-band equilateral triangular microstrip patch (ETMP) antenna suspended on a thin dielectric membrane. The membrane is released using a silicon bulk-micromachining technique. A set of closed-form expressions to calculate the resonant frequency of the proposed antenna on the micromachined substrate is also presented. The measured performance of the antenna structure is verified using the finite element method (FEM) based Agilent High Frequency Structure Simulator (version 5.5). The fabricated antenna exhibited a wide -10 dB return loss bandwidth of 1.2 GHz at 35.4 GHz. The measured antenna cross-polarization level is less than -15 dB in both the E- and H-planes.