A Liquid-Crystal-Based Dynamic Metasurface Antenna for Electronical Beam-Steering at 105 GHz

• Published in: IEEE transactions on antennas and propagation Vol. 72; no. 6; pp. 5313 - 5318
• Main Authors: Wang, Peng-Yuan, Sievert, Benedikt, Rennings, Andreas, Erni, Daniel
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.06.2024; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Antennas; Apertures; Beam steering; Couplings; Electrodes; holographic antenna; leaky wave antenna (LWA); liquid crystal (LC); Liquid crystals; Metamaterials; Metasurfaces; millimeter wave (mmWave); Phased arrays; Scattering; Thickness; tunable device
• ISSN: 0018-926X; 1558-2221
• DOI: 10.1109/TAP.2024.3387713

This communication presents a dynamic metasurface antenna for electronic beam-steering over 100 GHz. The antenna consists of 40 liquid crystal (LC)-filled metamaterial unit cells, which interact with the guided wave and scatter the energy from the antenna aperture. The unit cells are individually addressable in coupling strength with external biasing voltages. Therefore, the aperture field can be manipulated to radiate directional beams. Experimental results show that the antenna has a beam-scanning range of 66° in E-plane at 105 GHz. The half-power beamwidth <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">\theta _{\mathbf {HPBW}} </tex-math></inline-formula> and realized gain at 105 GHz are around 5° and 5.7 dB, respectively. The response time for beam-steering is approximately 0.5 s with a 12-<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">\mu \text{m} </tex-math></inline-formula>-thick LC layer. The total thickness of the antenna is only 0.61 mm.