Method of Designing a Planar Scan Angle Enhancing Metalens Featuring Lossless Wide Scanning at mmWave

Abstract

For the first time, a method to design a planar scan angle enhancing lens with minimum beam distortion for automotive radar at millimeter-wave is presented. The proposed lens is not only advantageous regarding its planar topology but also offers a solution to the chronic problem surrounding planar phased array antenna and planar lenses: scan loss. In this article, ray optics and ray transfer matrix are applied to Galilean lens configuration from which the concept of scan enhancement and compensating parameters are conceived. The basic idea of compensating lies in re-focusing the portion of the beams and suppressing transmission at extreme angles. Visual analysis of the wave refraction and designing of the lens system is conducted using 2-D ray-tracing code. Full-wave simulation validates the effectiveness of the proposed idea by extending the limited scan range of the phased array antenna from 45° to 58° with gain fluctuation below 1.1 dB at E-band. The radiation efficiency is calculated to be 0.86 at 76.5 GHz. Furthermore, the proposed lens system is fabricated using low-temperature co-fired ceramic (LTCC) technology and experimentally verified. Series-fed array antennas integrated with scan angle enhancing meta lens (SAEMLs) confirmed the shift of the gain peak from 46° to 58°, proving that SAEML can effectively extend the scanning range of phased arrays with small gain variation.