Electrically Small High Permittivity Lens Antenna Using Artificially Loaded Thermoplastics at 170 GHz

This contribution presents the development of an electrically small lens antenna using an artificially loaded thermoplastic at 140-170GHz. We will present the on-going development of the Fly’s Eye front end antenna concept that was presented in [1]. The antenna is composed on a dual plastic lens, a core lens and a shell lens, fed by a double slot. The core-lens, being presented in this contribution, is a spherical lens made from an artificially loaded plastic of permittivity 9.5. To the best of our knowledge, this thermoplastic material has not been used for lens antennas in this frequency range before. A 4mm lens prototype has been developed using this material, which includes an antireflective layer synthesized by drilling sub-wavelength holes on the lens contour. Full-wave simulations show a negligible degradation of the performance of the anti-reflection layer compared to an ideal homogeneous matching layer. Physical measurements and antenna measurements confirm that the antenna's performance matches the design specifications.