Abstract
Emerging technologies such as 5G communication systems, autonomous vehicles and satellite Internet have led to a renewed interest in 2D antennas that are capable of generating fixed/scannable pencil beams. Although traditional active phased arrays are technologically suitable for these applications, there are cases where other alternatives are more attractive, especially if they are simpler and less costly to design and fabricate. Recently, the concept of the Peripherally-Excited (PEX) antenna array has been proposed, promising a sizable reduction in the active-element count, especially when compared with traditional phased arrays. Albeit at the price of exhibiting some constraints on the possible beam-pointing directions. Here, we demonstrate the first practical implementation of the PEX antenna concept, and the proposed design is capable of generating single or multiple independently scannable pencil beams at broadside and tilted radiation directions, from a shared radiating aperture. The proposed structure is also easily scalable to higher millimeter-wave frequencies, and can be particularly useful in MIMO and duplex antenna applications, commonly encountered in automotive radars, among others.
Highlights
Emerging technologies such as 5G communication systems, autonomous vehicles and satellite Internet have led to a renewed interest in 2D antennas that are capable of generating fixed/scannable pencil beams
A particular case of interest here is the two-dimensional (2D) variation of Schelkunoff’s equivalence principle, where electromagnetic waves E-H are defined inside a surface Si that is outline by a closed contour C. External to this contour is a surface So, that is free from any electromagnetic waves, and is conveniently filled with a perfect-electric conductor (PEC)
For a vertically polarized electromagnetic wave, this setup can be realized in practice using two closely-spaced PEC planes
Summary
Emerging technologies such as 5G communication systems, autonomous vehicles and satellite Internet have led to a renewed interest in 2D antennas that are capable of generating fixed/scannable pencil beams. The generated pencil beam can be scanned in both elevation and azimuth along predefined contours, by mechanically changing the relative orientation between the incident plane wave and the 1D slots. This CTS array concept has been realized using a fully-metallic structure with three separate metal layers in ref. These metal layers are implemented using contact-less gap waveguides, allowing the mechanical rotation of the top radiating layer relative to the bottom feeding layers, changing the relative orientation between the excited plane wave and the long slots This leads to a continuous scanning of the generated pencil beam in both azimuth and elevation along a single predefined contour. This parallel CTS antenna solution is used extensively in SatComm-on-the-move commercial systems, even though mechanical rotation is still needed to achieve full-space scanning
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