基于液晶技术的可重构多波束全息天线用于Ka波段低轨卫星应用

The requirements of low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite systems for high-precision and selective multiple coverage, have driven much interest and demand for millimeter-wave multibeam antennas. However, the key challenge is to provide fully independent control of each beam with a single source, and metasurfaces have paved the way to solve this problem. Here, we present a reconfigurable multibeam holographic antenna (HA) at 36 GHz. In particular, we used liquid crystals (LC) to implement a low power consumption and lightweight antenna. Each unit cell is selectively driven by connected bias lines according to the calculated holographic pattern. Consequently, the proposed multibeam HA can radiate in the desired direction and control each beam independently. Furthermore, the gain difference in each beam can be corrected by the amplitude coefficient to radiate with nearly equal gain in each direction. The proposed HA demonstrated the scanning range of 60° at 36 GHz, with a peak gain of 8.7 dBi. Additionally, the peak directivity is 12.7 dBi, the 3-dB bandwidth is about 1 GHz at the center frequency of 36 GHz, and the operating bandwidth is 2.8 GHz ( 34.8-37.6 GHz).