A Planar Near Field Setup for Millimeter-Wave System-Embedded Antenna Testing

Abstract

An experimental method to perform near-field measurement of system-embedded antennas is presented. The proposed approach employs two probe antennas, one fixed and one scanning, enabling to retrieve both amplitude and phase of the near-field. This allows to employ conventional nearfield to far-field transformations, without the need to resort to phase retrieval approaches. The technique is first demonstrated on a standalone 60GHz patch, showing the good agreement between the proposed method and a conventional (one probe) near-field characterization. Then, the method is applied to the characterization of embedded antennas operating in the 60GHz and 94GHz bands, and it is benchmarked with simulations and conventional far-field characterization techniques.