Design and Fabrication of a High-Gain Low-Sidelobe V-Band Wideband Gap Waveguide Slot Antenna Array

This paper presents the design of a high efficiency corporate-fed 16×16-slot array antenna in the V band. The antenna is built using three unconnected metal layers in ridge gap waveguide (RGW) technology. A 2×2 cavity-backed slot subarray is designed in a ridge gap waveguide cavity. The cavity is fed through a coupling slot from a ridge gap waveguide corporate-feed network in the lower layer. The subarray is numerically optimized in an infinite array environment. The corporate-feed network is realized by a texture of pins and a guiding ridge. The simulated antenna element shows a relative bandwidth input reflection coefficient better than -10 dB, and a -25 dB sidelobe level and -40 null depth have been realized.