Three-Dimensional Printed mm-Wave Circularly Polarized Filtering Antenna With Flexible Design and Spurious Suppression

In this communication, a 3-D printed circularly polarized (CP) filtering antenna with spurious suppression for fifth-generation (5G) millimeter-wave (mm-wave) applications is presented. First, a composite resonator (C-Res), serving as both the last-stage resonator of a waveguide filter and an aperture antenna, is utilized to realize a filtering linearly polarized (LP) antenna. The fourth-order electric cross-coupling topology is employed to generate two radiation nulls at both sides of the passband, enhancing the selectivity. Then, a polarizer is presented and placed in front of the LP antenna to obtain the CP radiation. The operating principles of the polarizer are analyzed in detail, which features flexible size and insensitivity to the original filtering response. To demonstrate the concept, three filtering CP antennas with different polarizer dimensions are designed, exhibiting similar responses. After that, to suppress spurious modes and extend the spurious-free region, the defected ground structures (DGSs) are introduced. Finally, all three CP antennas are fabricated using 3-D printing and tested. Measured results show that 10 dB return loss and 3 dB AR bandwidths for all antennas are about 7% and 9%, respectively.