Wide-Angle Scanning Antennas for Millimeter-Wave 5G Applications

A number of designs for scanning antennas are presented in this work to realize a one- or two-dimensional scan. The first of these is a Luneburg lens, together with a feed array, designed to realize a wide-angle scan the second design is based on the use of an electronically reconfigurable phase shifter, which utilizes PIN or varactor diodes inserted between radiating slots in a curved waveguide to provide the desired phase shifts. Next, the paper introduces a novel design to realize both one- and two-dimensional scans, by using reconfigurable metasurface type of panels to provide a wide-angle beam-scanning performance, without compromising either the impedance match or the gain of the array. Additionally, the paper describes several techniques for enhancing the gain of the array to achieve gain levels as high as 30 dB, to render the scanning array competitive with reflectors, for instance.