Experimental Characterization of a Circularly-Polarized 1-Bit Unit-Cell for Beam Steerable Transmitarrays at Ka-Band

Luca Di Palma (1) , Antonio Clemente (1) , Laurent Dussopt (1) , Ronan Sauleau (2) , Patrick Potier (3) , Philippe Pouliguen (4)

1 CEA-LETI - Commissariat à l'énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives - Laboratoire d'Electronique et de Technologie de l'Information
2 IETR - Institut d'Électronique et des Technologies du numéRique
3 DGA.MI - DGA Maîtrise de l'information
4 DGA - Direction générale de l'armement [Bagneux]

We propose here an experimental characterization procedure applied to a 1-bit reconfigurable transmitarray unit-cell working in circular polarization at Ka-band. The transmission phase of the unit-cell is controlled on the receiving side by switching two p-i-n diodes integrated on the radiating element. The circular polarization is generated on the transmitting side with a truncated corner patch antenna. A specific waveguide characterization setup and related procedure have been developed to extract the unit-cell S-matrix. The proposed setup includes non-standard waveguide sections, ad-hoc transitions and an Ortho-Mode Transducer (OMT). The experimental results demonstrate a good agreement with full-wave simulations with a discrepancy of less than 0.1 dB on the measured minimum insertion loss of 1.65 dB at 29 GHz. A 3-dB bandwidth larger than 12% has been measured.

Mots clés: circular polarization; transmitarray antenna; discrete lens; array lens; Ka-band; Index Terms-Waveguide simulator

Domaines: Sciences de l'ingénieur [physics]

Luca Di Palma, Antonio Clemente, Laurent Dussopt, Ronan Sauleau, Patrick Potier, et al.. Experimental Characterization of a Circularly-Polarized 1-Bit Unit-Cell for Beam Steerable Transmitarrays at Ka-Band. IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation, 2019, 67 (2), pp.1300-1305. ⟨10.1109/TAP.2018.2880095⟩. ⟨hal-01987895⟩