An Electrically Steerable Parasitic Array Radiator in Package Based on Liquid Crystal

• Published in: IEEE antennas and wireless propagation letters Vol. 18; no. 11; pp. 2365 - 2369
• Main Authors: Shu, Jun, Xu, Guanghui, Peng, Hongli, Mao, Junfa
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.11.2019; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Antenna in package (AiP); Antenna measurements; Antenna radiation patterns; Antennas; Bandwidths; Bias; Direct current; electrically steerable parasitic array radiator (ESPAR); Extremely high frequencies; Impedance; liquid crystal (LC); Liquid crystals; Millimeter waves; Parasitic elements (antennas); Permittivity; Phased arrays; Power consumption; Radiators; Steering
• ISSN: 1536-1225; 1548-5757
• DOI: 10.1109/LAWP.2019.2933458

An electrically steerable parasitic array radiator in package based on liquid crystal (LC) is presented. It consists of one main and two parasitic inverted microstrip patch elements on an embedded LC layer with direct current bias. The antenna is designed to operate under the voltage mode at Ka-band. By varying the induced voltages on parasitic elements, the main beam can be steered to the desired direction. Measured results show that the pattern can be steered from -27° to +29° continuously in the H-plane at 28 GHz. The peak realized gain is 6.03 dBi with 1 dB variation within the steering range. The array achieves an 8.3% impedance bandwidth and avoids both large direct current power consumption and complicated bias scheme, making it a good antenna candidate for millimeter-wave 5G access point applications.