Experimental Validation of a 2-Bit Reconfigurable Unit-Cell for Transmitarrays at Ka-Band

• Published in: IEEE access Vol. 8; pp. 114991 - 114997
• Main Authors: Clemente, Antonio, Diaby, Fatimata, Palma, Luca Di, Dussopt, Laurent, Sauleau, Ronan
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Piscataway IEEE 2020; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Apertures; beam forming; beam steering; Current measurement; discrete lens; Electromagnetic waveguides; electronically steerable antenna; Engineering Sciences; Integrated circuit modeling; Ka-band; P-i-n diodes; Patch antennas; PIN diodes; Quantization (signal); Reconfiguration; Substrates; Transmission loss; Transmitarray antennas; Unit cell; Waveguides; electronically steerable antenna; beam forming; beam steering; discrete lens; Ka-band; Transmitarray antennas
• ISSN: 2169-3536; 2169-3536
• DOI: 10.1109/ACCESS.2020.3003698

This paper presents the experimental results of a 2-bit electronically reconfigurable unit-cell for transmitarrays at Ka-band. The proposed unit-cell architecture is based on a six-metal layers design and three dielectric substrates. Two patch antennas are printed respectively on the top and bottom layers of the stack-up to achieve an antenna-filter-antenna structure. To implement the desired 2-bit phase resolution, two p-i-n diodes are bonded on each patch. The unit-cell has been fabricated and characterized in a specific waveguide simulator. The measurement results are compared to the simulated ones and show minimum transmission loss in the range 1.5 - 2.3 dB. The 3-dB fractional bandwidth is in the range 10.1 - 12.1%.