Development of Rogers RT/Duroid 5880 Substrate-Based MIMO Antenna Array for Automotive Radar Applications

Abstract

In this paper, a novel 2 × 2 multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) antenna array with four patch elements is designed. The proposed antenna is the first dual band, operating at two prominent working frequencies: 24 (24.286-25.111) GHz and 77 GHz (75.348–79.688), of automotive radars. This structure is composed of two antenna modules colocated on a single substrate, whereas each module is made up of a corporate fed planar array of two elements. This attractive feature enables us to utilize the antenna in two different ways; either both modules serve as the transmitting/receiving antenna of a monostatic radar or one module serves as a transmitter and the other one as the receiver of a bistatic radar. Most of the existing autonomous radar applications operating at 24 GHz are going to become obsolete, and all countries have plans of shifting towards the 77 GHz band. Hence, our design is very attractive as it operates with the required performance in both the bands with another added feature of the MIMO structure. The placement of antenna elements is also optimized in terms of inter- and intraelement separation of greater than λ/2 so as to ensure high diversity gain of 9.6 dBi. Moreover, the proposed antenna structure with only two antenna elements is able to achieve a high gain of around 11.8 dBi and 11.3 dBi at the dual operating modes of 24 GHz and 77 GHz, respectively. In addition to the above-mentioned benefits, this design also addresses mutual coupling reduction that is a common problem in MIMO structures by using complementary split ring resonator (CSRR) structures. State-of-the-art comparison with the recent literature shows that the proposed antenna has less number of antenna elements, an adequate gain, an excellent VSWR value, and high isolation.