IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS, VOL.
13, 2014
Design of High-Directivity Compact-Size Conical
Horn Lens Antenna
Mustafa K. Taher Al-Nuaimi, Wei Hong, Fellow, IEEE, and Yan Zhang, Member, IEEE
Abstract—The design of lightweight, compact-size, and high-di-
rectivity conical horn lens antenna that covers both 71–76 and
81–86 GHz bands is presented in this letter. The conventional
conical moderate-gain horn antenna is integrated with a planar
inhomogeneous dielectric flat transmit-array lens having diameter
of 35 mm and thickness of 6.35 mm by covering its aperture. The
transmit-array lens is designed based on the perforating dielectric
technique that is based on the drilling of numerous holes of vari-
able diameters through a dielectric host material. The unit cell size
is about , which allows for easier fabrication. The proposed
lens consists of eight concentric zones of same width of 2.32 mm
and sharing the same host dielectric material. A directivity of
26.4 dBi, 9 dBi improvement, sidelobe level (SLL) of 15.7 dB at
74 GHz and directivity of 27 dBi, 9.9 dBi improvement, and SLL
of 18.4 dB at 86 GHz were achieved. The proposed horn antenna
is 44.46% shorter than the conventional horn antenna producing
the same directivity, where the horn antenna length reduction is a
result of using the proposed transmit-array lens
Index Terms—Dielectric lens, high-gain antenna, horn antenna.
I. INTRODUCTION
R ECENTLY, there is an increasing interest in the design
of lightweight and high-directivity antennas for different
applications in millimeter- and submillimeter-wave frequency
bands because of the rapidly growing number of communica-
tion systems at these frequencies. Horn antennas have been used
for long time as a high-gain radiator. The gain of the horn an-
tenna is function to its physical size, and realizing a high-gain
(narrow beamwidth) horn antenna will result in a heavy, bulky,
and impractically long horn antenna, especially at low frequen-
cies [1], [2]. Increasing the flare angle to reduce the horn antenna
length will result in large quadratic phase error in the horn aper-
ture, thus broadening the beamwidth. However, this introduced
large quadratic phase error can be corrected by using a dielectric
lens positioned in the horn aperture in order to increase the flare
angle and reduce the axial length of the horn. Such a lens may
be produced in a various range of shapes and materials, such as
planar 2-D lenses and nonplanar 3-D lenses using different di-
electric materials [3]–[5]. These dielectric lenses mounted at its
aperture will concentrate the radiated energy into a narrow beam
and prevent it from spreading in undesired directions with more
advantages such as good return loss, high gain, and low sidelobe
levels (SLLs).
Manuscript received November 18, 2013; revised December 06, 2013; ac-
cepted December 28, 2013. Date of publication January 02, 2014; date of cur-
rent version March 19, 2014. (Corresponding author: M. K. T. Al-Nuaimi)
The authors are with the State Key Laboratory of Millimeter Waves, School
of Information Science and Engineering, Southeast University, Nanjing 210096,
China (e-mail: mustafa.engineer@yahoo.com).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this letter are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/LAWP.2013.2297519
1536-1225 © 2014 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
See http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
467
In [2], a dielectric meniscus lens having elliptical outer sur-
face and spherical inner surface was used. In [5], a hyperbolic,
2-steps and 3-steps zoned dielectric lens was designed to cor-
rect the phase of conical horn antenna at 60 GHz. However, the
nonplanar profile of these lenses may reduce the accuracy of
fabrication and increase the weight of the lens. Recently, gra-
dient index (GRIN) metamaterial of positive index of refraction
has been used to increase the horn antenna gain. In [6], GRIN
metamaterial composed of an array of closed square metallic
rings was used to design the lens that covered the aperture of a
conical horn and increased its gain by about 6 dBi at 12 GHz.
In [7], modified split-ring resonators and metal strips were used
to design a detached zero-index metamaterial lens for antenna
gain enhancement where gain increased by 4.02 dBi from 8.9
to 10.8 GHz. In [8], the gain of a conical horn antenna was in-
creased by 5.7 dB by using a GRIN dielectric lens that consisted
of 92 annuli and based on drilling of deep subwavelength holes
in F4BMX material. The lens in [8] consisted of seven layers
stacked together, and the radial extent of the lens was 0.65 mm.
In [9], a low-refractive-index metamaterial composed of slices
of foam and metallic grids was used to cover the horn antenna to
enhance its gain by about 4 dBi from 11.8 to 12.8 GHz. Usually,
metamaterial uses metallic unit cells sharing the same dielec-
tric substrate, and thus, the excitation of surface waves, mutual
coupling, and ohmic losses are severe at millimeter and submil-
limeter bands. In [10], a four-layer 11-zone plate lens based
on drilling of subwavelength holes made of all-dielectric mate-
rials was designed using a transformation optics approach and
showed wide bandwidth performance. That lens required 44 dif-
ferent permittivity values, and in order to obtain the required
permittivity values, the drilled holes were filled with high-index
dielectric material rather than only free space.
In this letter, a single-dielectric-layer flat transmit-array
lens [11], [12] is designed to overcome the drawbacks of
using metamaterials, GRIN metamaterials, and conventional
nonplanar lenses and to shrink the size and enhance the gain of
a conical horn antenna for 71–76 and 81–86 GHz bands. The
proposed lens is mounted at the aperture of the horn antenna as
shown in Fig. 1 to prevent the radiated energy from spreading
in unwanted directions and to transform electromagnetic (EM)
energy spherical phase front into planar phase front. The pro-
posed lens is completely dielectric, and no metallic layers are
used, and thus the excitation of surface waves, mutual coupling,
and ohmic losses are expected to be lower.
II. PRINCIPLE OF OPERATION OF THE LENS
Generally, two approaches could be used to design dielec-
tric flat transmit-array lens based on phase correction of the
incoming EM waves with different electrical lengths [12]:
468
Fig. 1. Proposed horn lens antenna (a) without any lens, (b) with dielectric
material only, and (c) with proposed lens.
Fig. 2. (a) Multidielectric and (b) phase correction design philosophy.
1) multidielectric design, and 2) uniform dielectric. In the
multidielectric approach, the lens height remains fixed, but
different values of are required in order to obtain the required
phase correction as depicted in Fig. 2(a). This approach has not
been used here due to the complexity of composing a material
having several dielectric constants.
On the other hand, the uniform dielectric design approach in-
cludes etching slots in the host dielectric material to achieve
the required phase correction. In this letter, a little modified ap-
proach is used where the proposed lens is considered to be com-
posed of a group of phase shifters working all together to cor-
rect the phase of the incoming EM wave having different path
length as shown in Fig. 2(b). The proposed transmit-array lens
must provide a different phase correction at each point on its
receiving side so the EM waves on its transmitting side having
planar wavefront [13]. In order to find the required phase correc-
tion at each point, a Fermat’s principle of equality of electrical
path lengths of incoming EM waves is used and the following
formula is used:
(1)
IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS, VOL. 13, 2014
Fig. 3. Required phase at each point on the transmit-array lens aperture.
Fig. 4. Configuration of the unit cell (a) simulation setup in CST Microwave
Studio and (b) top view.
where is the required phase correction, is the free-space
wavelength at the design frequency, is the physical distance
from the phase center point of the feed source to the center point
of the lens, and is the distance from the center of the lens
to any random point on the lens aperture. The term is
added to the calculated required phase in order to keep the phase
value between . The required phase correction on
each point on this lens was calculated using MATLAB code and
presented in Fig. 3. The required phase correction is between
as depicted in Fig. 3.
III. UNIT CELL DESIGN AND CHARACTERIZATION
The unit cell (also called elementary cell or phasing element),
which is the basic building block of the transmit-array lens, is
based on drilling numerous air-filled holes having a diameter
through a host dielectric material, where is smaller than the
wavelength at the design frequency and unit cell size on order
of as depicted in Fig. 4. The unit cell size is about ,
which allows for easier fabrication process. The unit cell of four
drilled holes has been chosen to act as a phase-correcting ele-
ment. In order to assess the transmission properties of the unit
cell, only a single unit cell is simulated using properly chosen
boundary conditions as shown in Fig. 4(a). The unit cell is po-
sitioned in the middle of a TEM waveguide. The walls of the
TEM waveguide are formed by two E-walls and two H-walls
boundary conditions, while the other two ends are terminated by
two waveguide ports. The waveguide ports are placed at a cer-
tain distance from the closest upper face of the unit cell in order
AL-NUAIMI et al.: DESIGN OF HIGH-DIRECTIVITY COMPACT-SIZE CONICAL HORN LENS ANTENNA
Fig. 5. Phase response of at the center frequency of the two bands.
Fig. 6. Magnitude of the transmitted signal versus the hole radius.
to allow for enough propagation distance, and then the phase of
the transmitted signal is calculated at the surface of the unit cell.
This can be done simply by setting the reference plane of the
wave port in both HFSS and CST. In this letter, the design fre-
quency is chosen to be 73.5 GHz for the first band and 83.5 GHz
for the second band. One of the important design parameters
is the right selection of the unit cell size, where this parameter
will determine the center frequency of the transmit-array lens
and highly affect the magnitude (and phase) of the transmitted
signal, sidelobe level, and the aperture efficiency, so the unit cell
here is chosen to be mm . A detailed full-wave sim-
ulation study was performed (the results are not presented here)
to find the suitable dielectric substrate that can provide a phase
range from with high transmission level.
In this work, the dielectric material used has , two different EM simulators were used: transient solver of CST
mm, and at 10 GHz, and the elec-
trical properties of this material are unknown at 73.5 GHz. The
next step in the design of the transmit-array lens for a given fre-
quency is to calculate the phase diagram of the unit cell, which
includes the plot of the phase (in degrees) of the electromagnetic
waves transmitted through the unit cell versus one (or more)
geometrical parameter of the unit cell itself as shown in Fig. 5
and covering wide phase range from . The dielec-
tric losses is less than 2 dB at the design frequency as shown
in Fig. 6. Both the diameter and the coordinates of the drilled
469
Fig. 7. Layout of the conical horn antenna: mm, mm,
mm, mm, mm.
Fig. 8. Return losses of the horn antenna versus frequency.
holes within the unit cell were optimized to make the unit cell
show almost similar phase response at the center frequencies of
the two bands, and thus, the proposed lens is expected to have
very close radiation characteristics for the both bands. Next, the
diameters of each drilled hole were generated by comparing the
results in Figs. 3 and 6 and using MATLAB code.
IV. LENS HORN ANTENNA DESIGN AND RESULTS
The principle of operation of the proposed horn lens antenna
is based on using wave port to launch energy into a conventional
conical horn antenna and creating a spherical wavefront like
EM waves, which are then phase-corrected/transformed by the
proposed transmit-array lens that is mounted at the horn aper-
ture. The resulting radiated EM waves are a phase collimated
having planar wavefront. The layout of the shortened conical
horn antenna is presented in Fig. 7, where the horn antenna is
fed by a circular waveguide. For full-wave electromagnetic sim-
ulations and to increase the reliability of the presented results,
(based on finite integration technique) and HFSS (based on fi-
nite element technique). The proposed lens is integrated with
the conical horn antenna by mounting it at its aperture as in
Fig. 1. The return losses of the conical horn antenna
for both with/without transmit-array lens installed are presented
in Fig. 8. Installing the transmit-array lens will affect the input
match of the horn, but it is still with in the acceptable limit below
the 10-dB matching line.
The radiation characteristics of the horn lens antenna are
summarized in Table I, which shows the gain of the horn lens
470
Fig. 9. Far-field 3-D directivity pattern of the lens antenna. (a) 71 GHz.
(b) 76 GHz. (c) 81 GHz. (d) 86 GHz.
TABLE I
RADIATION CHARACTERISTICS OF THE HORN LENS ANTENNA
antenna for both 71–76 and 81–86 GHz bands. To show the
superior performance of the proposed transmit-array lens, the
gain of the horn antenna without any lens is listed as well. As
listed in Table I, the gain of the lens horn antenna is almost
stable (no high fluctuations) within the two bands. Clearly,
the directivity of the horn antenna is increased from 17.4 to
26.4 dBi ( dB, 9 dBi improvement, SLL of 15.7 dB)
at 74 GHz and from 17.1 to 27 dBi ( dB, 9.9 dBi im-
provement, and SLL of 18.4 dB) at 86 GHz. This is because
the lens will transform the EM waves radiated by the horn
antenna with spherical wavefront to a planar wavefront in the
near-field region, and thus a high directive radiation pattern in
the far-field region will be produced [6]. The difference in the
directivity and the gain values could be attributed to the dielec-
tric loss of the material composing the lens. With such achieved
gain, a lens physical area of mm
IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS, VOL. 13, 2014
provides an aperture efficiency of at 74 GHz and
at 86 GHz. The far-field 3-D directivity pattern at
various frequencies are presented in Fig. 9, where in all cases a
directive radiation pattern was achieved as a result of using the
transmit-array lens. A conical horn antenna without any lens
that produces the gain listed in Table I is designed as well, and
it is found that the length of the horn without any lens must be
93 mm, which means the proposed lens horn antenna is 44.46%
shorter than the horn without lens with lighter weight.
V. CONCLUSION
In this letter, the design of a lightweight, compact-size, and
high-directivity conical horn lens antenna is presented. The
standard conical horn antenna is integrated with a dielectric flat
transmit-array perforated lens. The flat lens was designed in
such a way to correct the phase error at the horn aperture and
to prevent the energy radiated by the antenna from spreading
in unwanted directions. The proposed horn antenna is 44.46%
shorter than the conventional horn antenna producing the same
directivity. The proposed antenna can cover both 71–76 and
81–86 GHz bands. A directivity of 26.4 dBi, SLL of 15.7 dB,
and aperture efficiency of at 74 GHz and directivity
of 27 dBi and SLL of 18.4 dB, and aperture efficiency of
at 86 GHz were achieved.
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