A Liquid Crystal-Based Dynamic Metasurface Antenna for Electronical Beam-Steering at 105 GHz

This paper presents a dynamic metasurface antenna for electronic beam-steering over 100 GHz. The antenna consists of 40 liquid crystal-filled metamaterial unit cells, which interact with the guided wave and scatter the energy from the antenna aperture. The unit cells are individually addressable in coupling strength with external biasing voltages. Therefore, the aperture field can be manipulated to radiate directional beams. Experimental results show that the antenna has a beam-scanning range of 66° in E-plane at 105 GHz. The half-power beamwidth θ _HPBW and realized gain at 105 GHz are around 5° and 5.7 dB, respectively. The response time for beam-steering is approximately 0.5 s with a 12-μm-thick liquid crystal layer. The total thickness of the antenna is only 0.61 mm.