Search

Liquid Crystal-based mm-wave spatially fed antennas with electronic reconfiguration are a promising solution at the higher frequencies required in next generation networks. However, one of the main drawbacks of the technology in these bands stems from the high reconfigurability times they present. Through this work, a relevant step towards overcoming the temporal problem by using Dual Frequency Liquid Crystals (DFLC) is presented. This paper details, for the first time, both the electromagnetic and temporal characterization of four commercially available DFLC mixtures in W-band, enabling their use in designing faster devices. To evaluate the experimental characterization, a reflectarray surface (made of 50x50 cells) specifically designed to achieve fast switching times with a sufficient phase range has been manufactured and measured. For this cell, a preliminary addressing technique based on overdriving has been used, exhibiting reconfigurability (rise and decay) times of 20 ms, one order of magnitude faster than the current state of the art of LC-based mm-wave planar devices. The measured results match the simulations, and reveal that a precisely designed biasing technique using overdrive must be used for DFLC-cells to achieve time reduction. Additionally, the benefits of this technology compared with other LC acceleration strategies in mm-wave are discussed.

The slow response time of planar Liquid Crystal (LC)-based phase-shift metasurface and Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RIS) cells is addressed in this paper by introducing a polymer network LC (PNLC) mixture suitable at mm-wave bands. Since the conventional effective isotropic model used in optical cells for describing the PNLC is not suitable in RF, an effective anisotropic and uniaxial model for such mixture is provided and experimentally validated at 100 GHz for the first time. In order to compare the temporal performance and tunability of the PNLC, transmissive and reflective cells, containing conventional LC and PNLC, have been manufactured and measured at optical and mm-wave frequencies. The temporal responses of PNLC are also compared for both RF and optical cells, obtaining relevant differences between their improvement factors, which are also discussed. Specifically, a 50 fold response time improvement is attained in cells designed to work at 100 GHz, although at the expense of a 3X tunability reduction. The model, which is robust to varying angle of incidence and cell dimensions, has been experimentally validated by designing and manufacturing a PNLC reflectarray cell of a different geometry. The cell shows reconfigurability times of 210ms, representing a significant improvement with respect to state-of-the-art response time in mm-wave cells, which are in the order of several seconds.

A new reflectarray cell operating in dual-frequency band is proposed to simultaneously discriminate between orthogonal circular polarizations at transmit and receive frequencies (20/30 GHz) in Ka-band. The reflectarray cell, which consists of two dielectric layers with two levels of printed elements (dipoles and circular arcs), has been characterized for both circular and linear polarizations at each frequency band.In addition to implement the variable rotation technique in a dual frequency operation, the reflectarray cell allows to introduce phase corrections at the receive frequencies. This concept applied to reflectarray antennas in Ka band will allow to produce two adjacent beams per feed in orthogonal circular polarizations at both transmission and reception frequency bands.

A new reflectarray cell operating in dual-frequency band is proposed to simultaneously discriminate between orthogonal circular polarizations at transmit and receive frequencies (20/30 GHz) in Ka-band. The reflectarray cell, which consists of two dielectric layers with two levels of printed elements (dipoles and circular arcs), has been characterized for both circular and linear polarizations at each frequency band.In addition to implement the variable rotation technique in a dual frequency operation, the reflectarray cell allows to introduce phase corrections at the receive frequencies. This concept applied to reflectarray antennas in Ka band will allow to produce two adjacent beams per feed in orthogonal circular polarizations at both transmission and reception frequency bands.

A broadband reflectarray cell made of three parallel dipoles printed on a dielectric layer is presented. A 33% bandwidth is achieved for the cell made of dipoles, which is larger than that obtained for a reference cell consisting of three stacked square patches (26%). Using this cell, a 41-cm reflectarray antenna has been designed to produce a collimated beam at 9.5 GHz. The numerical results obtained for the reflectarray antenna made of parallel dipoles show a 1-dB bandwidth of 19%, a 65% efficiency, 0.2 dB of losses, and low levels of cross polarization (25 dB below the maximum). These results demonstrate a high performance for the proposed reflectarray antenna made of cells with three printed dipoles.

A broadband reflectarray cell made of three parallel dipoles printed on a dielectric layer is presented. A 33% bandwidth is achieved for the cell made of dipoles, which is larger than that obtained for a reference cell consisting of three stacked square patches (26%). Using this cell, a 41-cm reflectarray antenna has been designed to produce a collimated beam at 9.5 GHz. The numerical results obtained for the reflectarray antenna made of parallel dipoles show a 1-dB bandwidth of 19%, a 65% efficiency, 0.2 dB of losses, and low levels of cross polarization (25 dB below the maximum). These results demonstrate a high performance for the proposed reflectarray antenna made of cells with three printed dipoles.