Design of Programmable Transmitarray Antenna With Independent Controls of Transmission Amplitude and Phase

Abstract

A design method of programmable transmitarray antenna with independent controls of transmission amplitude and phase is proposed in C-band. The unit cell with cascaded structures mainly consists of four parts, including the receiving antenna, reconfigurable attenuator with p-i-n diodes, reconfigurable phase shifter with varactors, and transmitting antenna. Correspondingly, various manipulations of spatial electromagnetic (EM) fields are achieved by varying the bias voltages of p-i-n diodes and varactors in the transmitarray antenna. The fabricated unit cell is measured in a standard waveguide, and the whole array with <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$8\times 8$ </tex-math></inline-formula> unit cells is measured with two horns for calibration of the programmable EM features. The experimental results show that the transmission amplitude can range from −16 to −3.6 dB, and the transmission phase achieves 270° coverage independently at the operating frequency of 5.67 GHz under 16 bit programmable control. To further exhibit the capability and functionality of the proposed transmitarray antenna, the waveform engineering of adaptive beamforming and power-allocation beamforming is separately realized in the experiment. The measured results have good agreements with our theoretical calculations, verifying the validity of our design method.