60 GHZ FULL MEMS ANTENNA PLATFORM MECHANICALLY DRIVEN BY MAGNETIC ACTUATOR

Abstract: This paper presents a single antenna platform steered by external magnetic field where MMIC and capacitors are vertically integrated. Unique process skills are successfully optimized to implement a newly proposed MEMS antenna. A silicon grid is patterned on the processing wafer to prevent destruction of antenna by BCB delamination due to the stress applied to wafers. Moreover the stress barrier patterns are designed to increase fabrication yield by protecting structure failure during backside silicon release step. All the electrical elements such as MMIC, capacitors, patch antenna, and signal lines are integrated on a single silicon chip, thus the fabricated antenna system has smaller size and higher productivity than conventional ones. The vertically integrated MMIC especially results in a uniform gain at entire steering angles and reduced signal losses. The fabricated antenna is driven by a magnetic field externally applied with copper coils and the antenna beam patterns are obtained with various tilting angles. The scanning angles are -14°, 0°, +18° (H-plane), -18°, -12°, 0°, +12°, +16° (E-plane) and the center frequency of the fabricated antenna is 59.8 GHz close to the designed resonance frequency, 60 GHz.