Design and Demonstration of an Electronically Scanned Reflectarray Antenna at 100 GHz Using Multiresonant Cells Based on Liquid Crystals

Abstract

The design, fabrication, and measured results are presented for a reconligurable reflectarray antenna based on liquid crystals (LCs) which operates above 100 GHz. The antenna has been designed to provide beam scanning capabilities over a wide angular range, a large bandwidth, and reduced side-lobe level (SLL). Measured radiation patterns are in good agreement with simulations, and show that the antenna generates an electronically steerable beam in one plane over an angular range of 55° in the frequency band from 96 to 104 GHz. The SLL is lower than -13 dB for all the scan angles and -18 dB is obtained over 16% of the scan range. The measured performance is significantly better than previously published results for this class of electronically tunable antenna, and moreover, verifies the accuracy of the proposed procedure for LC modeling and antenna design.