A Low-RCS Multifunctional Shared Aperture With Wideband Reconfigurable Reflectarray Antenna and Tunable Scattering Characteristic
Pan Li, Hang Yu, Jianxun Su, Liwei Song, Qingxin Guo, Zengrui Li
Abstract
This article presents a low radar cross section (RCS) single-layer multifunctional shared aperture (MSA) with tunable manipulation of radiation and bistatic scattering patterns over the same wide frequency band. A low-cost positive-intrinsic-negative (p-i-n) diode is used in the unit cell to evoke the <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$180^{\circ } \pm 20^{\circ }$ </tex-math></inline-formula> reflection phase difference for <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$x$ </tex-math></inline-formula> -polarized incident waves; thus, the wideband beam steering and tunable bistatic scattering patterns can be generated. By integrating the interdigital capacitance (IC) into the unit cell, the reflection bandwidth limitation for <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$y$ </tex-math></inline-formula> -polarized waves at a higher frequency band is broken. Furthermore, the optimized multielement phase cancellation (OMEPC) method is adopted to maximize the RCS reduction (RCSR) bandwidth of <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$y$ </tex-math></inline-formula> -polarization. A 16 × 16-element MSA prototype is fabricated and measured. The experimental results show that the 3 dB gain bandwidth of the MSA is from 5.5 to 9.5 GHz with the fractional bandwidth (FBW) of 53.3%, and the common frequency band of 10 dB RCSR for <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$x$ </tex-math></inline-formula> - and <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$y$ </tex-math></inline-formula> -polarized waves is in the range of 4.5–9.6 GHz (FBW <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$=$ </tex-math></inline-formula> 72.3%). The low RCS MSA with tunable control of radiation and scattering patterns over a wide frequency band can be used in military radar and low detectable systems.