A Compact Ka-Band Active Integrated Antenna With a GaAs Amplifier in a Ceramic Package

This letter presents the design of a Ka-band active integrated antenna in package (AIAiP). A monolithic microwave integrated circuit amplifier based on the GaAs process and a compact patch antenna based on the printed circuit board process are implemented, respectively. Then, the amplifier and antenna are assembled together in a specified package using the wire-bond process. Thus, compared to the traditional solutions, the transmission loss and the size of the proposed AIAiP are significantly reduced. Furthermore, the influence of the bonding wire and the package is taken into account in the design of the amplifier and the antenna, respectively. A good agreement between the simulation and measurement results can be observed. The proposed AIAiP occupies a compact size of 7 × 7 mm 2 . Meanwhile, it achieves -10-dB impedance bandwidth from 33.4 to 37.2 GHz and a peak gain of 18.9 dBi at 35 GHz. Additionally, the impact of the package size on the antenna performance has been demonstrated for future AIA designers.