High-Efficiency Modulation and Harmonic Beam Scanning in Time-Modulated Array

A general high-efficiency time-modulated module and harmonic beam scanning time-modulated array (TMA) are proposed and investigated in this article. By introducing the periodically controlled phased shifters, a significant improvement on theoretical overall efficiency and transmitted bandwidth can be realized in harmonic beam scanning. Then an equivalent cascade structure of the general modulation module is proposed for RF circuit simplification and practicability in actual applications. Theoretical derivation and simulation results show that increased efficiency, 100% feeding network efficiency, and theoretical overall efficiency tending to 100% without consideration of insertion loss can be achieved with the increase of the phase-shifter states when only a single sideband is utilized. Compared to the existing state-of-the-art harmonic beam scanning TMAs, the proposed TMA exhibits a much higher overall efficiency while keeps a similar hardware complexity. Additionally, with acceptable increase of circuit complexity less than existing works, similar level of the wide transmission bandwidth can also be achieved. To experimentally verify the feasibility of the proposed general design, a 4-bit time-modulated module with reconfigurable states and the corresponding 8-element harmonic beam scanning TMA are fabricated and tested. The experiments on signal transmission and harmonic beam scanning demonstrate the effectiveness of power loss reduction and improvement in transmitted bandwidth with the increase of modulation phase states.