Pushing the Boundaries of Antenna-Efficiency Measurements towards 6G in a mm-Wave Reverberation Chamber

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.