Compact and Scalable Feed Architecture Based on Quasi-TEM Ridge Gap Horn to Reduce Power Dividers for Excitation of Large Arrays

Paper in proceeding, 2026

A compact, efficiency-enhanced feed architecture is proposed for 140-150 GHz for continuous-transverse-stub (CTS) arrays. The design cascades four hard-wall feed channels, each realized with artificial magnetic conductor (AMC) boundaries to produce a uniform aperture distribution (magnitude and phase) across a center-fed aperture, thereby eliminating the need for a large corporate divider network. This architecture can reduce the number of power dividers in the feeding network resulting in a reduction of the insertion loss and gain improvement. The proposed feed has amplitude and phase balance of ± 1.5 dB and ± 12°. When the proposed feeding is used to excite the CTS subarray, a realized gain of 27.8 dBi with radiation efficiency above 82% is achieved for gold plated structure with surface roughness of 0.9 μ m. The fully metallic AMC structure ensures low ohmic loss and simple fabrication without dielectric loading or precision alignment. The proposed compact, low-loss feed is scalable to realize high-gain antennas for sub-THz band.