Diffraction Synthesis and Experimental Verification of a Quasi-Optical Power Splitter at 150 GHz

Abstract

A general and flexible synthesis method based on the physical optics approximation is proposed for computing smooth-surface reliefs of reflectors. As a design example, the method has been applied to a quasi-optical power splitter consisting of two reflectors in a dual-offset configuration that couples a launched beam from a pyramidal horn antenna into a 2/spl times/4 horn antenna array. The two reflectors were treated as diffractive phase elements so that the proposed synthesis method allows reflector designs for many applications. The quasi-optical design has been confirmed at 150 GHz utilizing a vector field measurement system. The measured field distribution in the receiving antenna array plane is compared with the simulated one and shows a very good agreement.