Row–Column Beam Steering Control of Reflectarray Antennas: Benefits and Drawbacks

This letter proposes a method for controlling single-polarized phase-only reconfigurable reflectarray antennas by rows and columns instead of element-by-element, which enables an important simplification of the control circuitry. First, the fundaments of the method are presented, and then the implications on analog and digital implementations are discussed. Finally, applications beyond beam steering are also addressed. It is shown that this is a promising method for pure beam-steering applications in combination with analog control or with phase quantization with at least two bits. Remarkably, this last result contradicts the existing literature.