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 article. 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 multiport 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 and 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 multifunctional 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 multiport feeding network or T/R components. It has good potential in intelligent and low-cost beam-steering wireless communication systems.