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With 6G around the corner, the push for higher-frequency over-the-air testing of antennas is inevitable, where antenna efficiency is one of the key performance metrics. Reverberation chambers can be an ideal tool for performing antenna-efficiency measurements at mm-Wave frequencies, due to its flexibility in placement, and ability to perform rapid and repeatable measurements. However, to the authors’ best knowledge, no work on antenna efficiency above 47 GHz has been published so far. In this work, we show for the first time results of antenna efficiency using the two-antenna method up to 60 GHz, by using a novel mm-Wave reverberation chamber. We also evaluate chamber loss where we predict that larger systems, such as phased-array systems, can be measured inside this chamber as well, and that the current operational frequency range can be extended much further than 60 GHz for antenna-efficiency measurements.

In this work, we analyze for the first time antenna-efficiency measurements of a mm-wave phased-array antenna for smartphone applications by use of the reverberation-chamber-based three-antenna method. We measure the efficiency of the total system (array including an RF beamformer), and we introduce a new method to de-embed radiated emissions by other parts of the system from the efficiency result. We compare the measured result to a simulation model and conclude that the reverberation-chamber approach can yield accurate results when unwanted radiation is properly accounted for.