Amplitude and Phase Independently Adjustable Transmitarray Aperture and Its Applications to High Gain and Low Sidelobe Antenna

Abstract

This article introduces an amplitude and phase independently adjustable transmitarray aperture with a thin profile and low cost to fabrication characteristics, and a transmitarray antenna (TA) featuring the high gain and low sidelobe level (SLL) is realized based on it. The TA is made up of a standard feed horn and a transmitarray aperture, each of which comprises a three-layer metasurface that is well-designed to tune the transmitted phase and amplitude on its own. As a result, the transmitarray aperture can cover the 360° phase range required for phase compensation while also realizing the amplitude distribution calculated by the Taylor design, contributing to the low SLLs. The advantage of independently controlling the amplitude and phase not only enables the proposed TA to be easy to realize and less cost on optimization but also improves the performance of high gain and low SLLs with a low profile and easy fabrication. Theoretical analyses and simulations are carried out, and a prototype is fabricated and measured. At 10 GHz, the measured peak gain is 21.16 dBi, with SLLs of −31.21 and −29.93 dB in the H- and E-planes, respectively. As a result, the tight agreements between measurement and simulation validate the design concept.