A Flexible Implementation of Ka-Band Active Phased Array for Satellite Communication
Xiaolin Wang, Dongwon You, Xi Fu, Ho‐Jun Lee, Zheng Li, Daisuke Awaji, Jian Pang, Atsushi Shirane, Hiraku Sakamoto, Kenichi Okada
Abstract
This paper presents the design and implementation of a flexible, deployable Ka-band active phased array for satellite communication. Due to the flexibility, this phased array can be folded to keep in a small size before launching, then unfolded in outer space to get a large antenna aperture for better EIRP and beam synthesis. To make it flexible, this work adopts the flexible 4-layer liquid crystal polymer (LCP) board. A 32-element active phased array is successfully designed and fabricated on the flexible LCP. Measurement results show this phased array can work in 28 GHz. It can steer a beam angle from −50° to 50°, with −10 dBc sidelobe level. And it has −28.7 dB EVM with a 500MS/s symbol rate for 32 APSK.