Towards an Advanced Automotive Radar Front-end Based on Gap Waveguide Technology
Licentiate thesis, 2022

This thesis presents the early works on dual circularly polarized array antenna based on gap waveguide, also microstrip-to-waveguide transitions for integration of automotive radar front-end. Being the most widely used radar antenna, PCB antenna suffers from dielectric loss and design flexibility. Next generation automotive radars demand sophisticated antenna systems with high efficiency, which makes waveguide antenna become a better candidate. Over the last few years, gap waveguide has shown advantages for implementation of complicated antenna systems. Ridge gap waveguides have been widely used in passive gap waveguide components design including slot arrays. In this regard, two transitions between ridge gap waveguides and microstrip lines are presented for the integration with gap waveguide antennas. The transitions are verified in both passive and active configuration. Another work on packaging techniques is presented for integration with inverted microstrip gap waveguide antennas.
Systems utilizing individual linear polarization (LP) that lack polarimetric capabilities are not capable of measuring the full scattering matrix, thus losing information about the scenery. To develop a more advanced radar system with better detectability, dual circularly polarized gap waveguide slot arrays for polarimetric radar sensing are investigated. An 8×8 planar array using double grooved circular waveguide polarizer is presented. The polarizers are compact in size and have excellent polarization properties. Multi-layer design of the array antenna benefits from the gap waveguide technology and features better performance. The works presented in this thesis laid the foundation of future works regarding integration of the radar front end. More works on prototyping radar systems using gap waveguide technology will be presented in future publications.

Integration

packaging

gap-waveguide

antenna

radar

MMIC

polarimetric radar

automotive

dual circular polarization

Author

Qiannan Ren

Chalmers, Electrical Engineering, Communication, Antennas and Optical Networks

A Dual Circularly Polarized Array Antenna for Ka-Band Satellite Communications

2021 International Symposium on Antennas and Propagation, ISAP 2021,; (2021)

Paper in proceeding

Millimeter-Wave Vertical Transitions between Ridge Gap Waveguides and Microstrip Lines for Integration of MMIC with Slot Array

15th European Conference on Antennas and Propagation, EuCAP 2021,; (2021)

Paper in proceeding

Dual-Circularly Polarized Array Antenna Based on Gap Waveguide Utilizing Double-grooved Circular Waveguide Polarizer

IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation,; Vol. In Press(2022)

Journal article

Novel Integration Techniques for Gap Waveguides and MMICs Suitable for Multilayer Waveguide Applications

IEEE Transactions on Microwave Theory and Techniques,; Vol. In Press(2022)

Journal article

Subject Categories

Other Electrical Engineering, Electronic Engineering, Information Engineering

Publisher

Chalmers

More information

Created

9/12/2023