Effect of Surface Roughness on Antenna Array for Automotive Radar Applications

Recently, applications that use millimeter (mm) wave frequencies (30–300 GHz) have increased significantly to facilitate very high data rates and wide operational bandwidth. However, designing circuits and antennas at mm wave frequencies pose a challenge of its own. One such factor is surface roughness, which affects the conductivity of the metals used in the design and leads to degradation of performance. Surface roughness can be controlled using advanced and precise manufacturing techniques; however, they can be expensive. So, it is important to study the effect of surface roughness while designing mm wave circuits and antennas to avoid expensive modifications later in the design stages. In this paper, we consider one such application of automotive cruise control (ACC) radar that operates at 76.5 GHz and study how various values of surface roughness affect different performance parameters of the design.