Experimental Validation and Applications of mm-Wave 8x8 Antenna-in-Package (AiP) Array Platform

Phased array antennas play an indispensable role in millimeter-wave (mmWave) communications. The Antenna-in-package (AiP) system combines advanced antenna and packaging technology, making it highly valuable for various cellular, radar and automative applications. The benefits it brings in terms of small size, low development costs, low power consumption and fast beam-steering capability further drive the vast deployment of phased array antennas in mmWave systems. In this paper, an 8 × 8 AiP experimental platform is presented and its operating performance is measured and analyzed. Further, two application examples of the AiP are presented, namely, a platform for investigating the phased array calibration performance of different methods, and an AiP-based channel sounder for channel characterization. The performance of the channel sounder is verified by analysing the angle of arrival (AoA), angle of departure (AoD) and propagation delay of the measured dominant propagation components (DPCs)

An Efficient Multi-Beam Pattern Measurement Campaign for Millimeter-Wave Phased Arrays

The performance of millimeter-wave (mmWave) radio systems depends on accurate knowledge of mmWave phased array multi-beam patterns. However, the conventional antenna pattern measurement methods are inefficient for mmWave multibeam measurements. To solve the problem, a fast multi-beam reconstruction method has been proposed in the literature. Based on that, this paper conducts an efficient multi-beam pattern measurement campaign for a practical 4 × 4 mmWave phased array antenna-in-package (AiP). The measurement results show that the element patterns of an active phased array AiP measured in the on-off and all-on modes might differ, especially for large-scale arrays. Furthermore, the reconstructed array multi-beam patterns by the proposed method are compared with the conventional compact antenna testing range (CATR) measurement data. The all-on reconstructed array multi-beam patterns matches better with the target array patterns than the on-off reconstructed array patterns