Low-Cost Reconfigurable 1 bit Millimeter-Wave Array Antenna for Mobile Terminals
Yan Wang, Feng Xu, Ya‐Qiu Jin, Zhengwei Du
Abstract
A reconfigurable 1 bit millimeter-wave array antenna for mobile terminals is investigated. The reconfigurable array antenna consists of four reconfigurable 1 bit microstrip patch antenna elements. Each patch antenna element is fed by a slot on the ground. The 1 bit patch antenna element with phase values of <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$-\pi $ </tex-math></inline-formula> and 0 is achieved by selecting the feeding direction of microstrip line. After analyzing the performance of the 1 bit four-element array, a fixed phase is applied to mitigate the negative effects of the 1 bit phase quantized error. The 1 bit four-element arrays with and without the fixed phases are compared in detail. The overlapped −10 dB impedance bandwidth of a prototype array at different beam directions reaches 3 GHz (25–28 GHz). Within the frequency range of 26–28 GHz, the array with the fixed phases can steer the main beam from −34° to 35° without grating lobes. Within these steering beams, the performances of good array gain, moderate sidelobe level, and low cross-polarization level are achieved.