Analysis and Design of Simple, Low Loss and Low Cost Reconfigurable Reflectarrays

With the growing of wireless technology, the need for lower-profile, electronically reconfigurable, highly-directive beam-steering antennas is increasing. This thesis proposes a simple low loss, low cost electronic beam-steering antenna architecture by combining a variety of concepts including the single bit phase shifter, sub-wavelength element spacing and delta-sigma modulation. The starting point in the design of reflectarray antennas is the derivation of the so-called S-curve, which maps changes in unit cell design parameters to the phase of the scattered field from the cell. Both numerical and analytical techniques for analyzing linear-polarized fixed and reconfigurable reflectarray unit cell with lumped element has been developed. A 16 Ă 16 element reflectarray prototype operating at 5.5 GHz is presented the low loss performance and a beam-steering range of -20 to +20 degrees with a single bit phase shifter.M.A.S