In this paper, silicon micromachining has been used to demonstrate the poss
ibility of building high performance microwave and millimeter-wave antennas
. To suppress higher order substrate modes and increase the bandwidth of a
patch antenna, silicon substrate has been used and material has been select
ively removed under the patch area. In addition, the effect of etched groov
es around a patch element has been studied for performance improvement. It
has been shown that micromachined substrate structure can effectively suppr
ess unwanted surface wave modes resulting in improved radiation efficiency.
Moreover, effective dielectric constant curves for the shielded micromachi
ned substrates are provided for accurate design of patch antennas. We have
demonstrated that mutual coupling between the radiating patch elements due
to surface waves can be controlled using various micromachined substrate co
nfigurations.