Fully 3D-Printed mm-Wave Wide-Angle 1D Beam-Steering Antenna Using Zigzagged Lens Antenna Subarrays With Curved Focal Surfaces

This paper presents a fully 3D-printed wideband mm-wave beam-steering antenna concept capable of performing wide-angle electronic beam-steering by making use of zigzagged lens antenna subarrays (LASs) with curved focal surfaces. The concept is demonstrated through the design and realization of a 38 GHz antenna consisting of $L = 4$ dielectric slab waveguide (DSW) lenses each fed with structurally embedded $M = 6$ TEM horn antennas, which can effectively reduce the required number of phase shifters (PSs) from $N = M \times L = 24$ to $L = 4$ . It is demonstrated that the joint utilization of zigzagged LAS and curved focal surfaces with structurally integrated TEM horn antennas, all enabled through the design flexibilities offered by the emerging additive manufacturing (AM) technology, improves the realized gain, side lobe level (SLL), and beam-steering range in comparison to the earlier versions realized with planar focal surfaces. Specifically, the antenna exhibits a simulated realized gain of 16.5 dBi with an H-plane beam-steering range exceeding ±45° and a half-power beamwidth (HPBW) of 4.5° while maintaining an SLL below –9.3 dB across the entirety of the scan range. Measurements taken with the manufactured antenna prototype show excellent agreement with the performance obtained from full-wave simulations.