Electronically steered metasurface antenna

Michael Boyarsky,Jonah N Gollub,David R Smith,Mohammadreza F Imani,Timothy Sleasman

doi:10.1038/s41598-021-83377-9

Michael Boyarsky, Jonah N Gollub + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-83377-9

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Abstract

Mobile devices, climate science, and autonomous vehicles all require advanced microwave antennas for imaging, radar, and wireless communications. We propose a waveguide-fed metasurface antenna architecture that enables electronic beamsteering from a lightweight circuit board with varactor-tuned elements. Our approach uses a unique feed structure and layout that enables spatial sampling at the Nyquist limit of half a wavelength. We detail the design of this Nyquist metasurface antenna and experimentally demonstrate electronic beamsteering in two directions. Nyquist metasurface antennas can realize high performance without costly and power hungry phase shifters, making them a compelling technology for future antenna hardware.

Highlights

Mobile devices, climate science, and autonomous vehicles all require advanced microwave antennas for imaging, radar, and wireless communications
Reconfigurable antennas play a critical role in many critical technologies, including radar, microwave and imaging, communications, synthetic aperture radar, and many others
Capabilities in many of these fields have been hindered by the high cost and complexity of electronically scanned antenna systems, which have relied predominantly on active components

Summary

Introduction

Climate science, and autonomous vehicles all require advanced microwave antennas for imaging, radar, and wireless communications. Aperture antennas that generate and steer beams or other tailored patterns inherently make use of this Fourier relationship It is the phase of the aperture fields that has much more of an influence on the far-field waveform, leading naturally to the concept of the phased-array antenna. The number of radiating nodes is typically set by the Nyquist theorem, which states that a signal needs to be sampled at a rate twice the highest frequency component present For aperture antennas, this requirement translates to spatial sampling of half of the operational wavelength across the aperture (depending on the desired steering limits). In antenna systems where both the phase and magnitude are controlled, such as in more advanced electronically scanned antennas (ESAs), amplifiers, circulators, and other components are often present at each node, resulting in high performance, but at the cost of considerable system complexity, cost, and power draw[4,5,8]. Leaky-wave antennas can form a beam with a series of irises etched into a waveguide, but struggle to form arbitrary radiation patterns independent of frequency[10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17]

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