A Fast Multibeam Measurement Method for Millimeter-Wave Phased Arrays

Abstract

Accurate knowledge of multibeam radiation patterns of millimeter-wave (mmWave) phased arrays is a key to mmWave radio system performance. The multibeam radiation patterns can be measured by conventional antenna test ranges in a sequential manner. However, these tasks can be time-consuming and low efficient in practice, especially for large-scale arrays with many beam-steering states. To address this problem, this letter proposes a multibeam reconstruction method, which can measure all possible steered beams in a fast and efficient manner. In the proposed method, multiple beam patterns are reconstructed synchronously by a fast element pattern retrieving method based on a few sparse measurement samples, which were obtained in a multiprobe setup or with the help of a turntable in a single probe setup. The proposed method is experimentally validated in a compact antenna testing range (CATR) setup at 28 GHz for a <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$4\times 4$</tex-math></inline-formula> mmWave phased array with an integrated antenna-in-package design. The experimental results show that the reconstructed array multibeam patterns by the proposed method are comparable to the conventional CATR measurement results but in a faster way, which validates the effectiveness of the proposed method.