Low-Cost 2-Bit Phase and 1-Bit Amplitude Reconfigurable Antenna for Beam Steering and Shaping

A low-cost 2-bit phase and 1-bit amplitude reconfigurable array with beam-steering and beam-shaping functions is presented in this paper. To manipulate the radiation beam, a novel 2-bit phase radiator is proposed based on the mode control and the phase-shifting surface. This radiator element can directly realize four switchable radiation phase states without extra phase-shifting circuits. By introducing the higher-order mode characteristics, these array elements are fed by a single-port cavity rather than the conventional multi-port feeding networks. Thus, this design is very different from traditional phased arrays and bit arrays. More importantly, the 1-bit amplitude switching function is cleverly introduced by controlling the field distribution of this radiator, which can further manipulate the beam shape. To validate the proposed working principles, a phase & amplitude digitally reconfigurable substrate integrated waveguide (SIW) antenna is fabricated and measured. By controlling the digital phase and amplitude states of each element, this antenna can realize multi-functional beam steering and shaping. The achieved impedance bandwidth is 9.52-10.27 GHz (7.6 %), and the realized peak gain is 11.0 dBi. To our knowledge, the presented design is a new type of phase and amplitude digitally reconfigurable antenna/array without the multi-port feeding network or T/R components. It has good potential in intelligent and low-cost beam-steering wireless communication systems.