A Review of Broadband Low-Cost and High-Gain Low-Terahertz Antennas for Wireless Communications Applications

Low-terahertz (Low-THz, 100 GHz-1.0 THz) technology is expected to provide unprecedented data rates in future generations of wireless system such as the 6th generation (6G) mobile communication system. Increasing the carrier frequencies from millimeter wave to THz is a potential solution to guarantee the transmission rate and channel capacity. Due to the large transmission loss of Low-THz wave in free space, it is particularly urgent to design high-gain antennas to compensate the additional path loss, and to overcome the power limitation of Low-THz source. Recently, with the continuous updating and progress of additive manufacturing (AM) and 3D printing (3DP) technology, antennas with complicated structures can now be easily manufactured with high precision and low cost. In the first part, this paper demonstrates different approaches of recent development on wideband and high gain sub-millimeter-wave and Low-THz antennas as well as their fabrication technologies. In addition, the performances of the state-of-the-art wideband and high-gain antennas are presented. A comparison among these reported antennas is summarized and discussed. In the second part, one case study of a broadband high-gain antenna at 300 GHz is introduced, which is an all-metal model based on the Fabry-Perot cavity (FPC) theory. The proposed FPC antenna is very suitable for manufacturing using AM technology, which provides a low-cost, reliable solution for emerging THz applications.