Circular-Polarized Reconfigurable Grating Antenna for Low-Cost Millimeter-Wave Beam-Steering

This communication presents a circular-polarized (CP) reconfigurable grating antenna for low-cost millimeter-wave beam steering. A CP grating array is introduced. Using an inertialess mechanical movement, the grating design can be reconfigured along the surface of a dielectric image line, allowing a directive CP beam to steer across a wide range of angles. Over 43/spl deg/ of beam steering is achieved at 32.5 GHz with axial ratio less than 1 dB across the entire scan range. Measured performance agrees well with theory. These results are inherently scalable to higher millimeter-wave frequencies and should have numerous uses in emerging millimeter-wave satellite communications applications and other related systems for mobile communications and radar.