A Flexible Implementation of Ka-Band Active Phased Array for Satellite Communication

This paper presents the design and implementation of a flexible, deployable Ka-band active phased array for satellite communication. Due to the flexibility, this phased array can be folded to keep in a small size before launching, then unfolded in outer space to get a large antenna aperture for better EIRP and beam synthesis. To make it flexible, this work adopts the flexible 4-layer liquid crystal polymer (LCP) board. A 32-element active phased array is successfully designed and fabricated on the flexible LCP. Measurement results show this phased array can work in 28 GHz. It can steer a beam angle from −50° to 50°, with −10 dBc sidelobe level. And it has −28.7 dB EVM with a 500MS/s symbol rate for 32 APSK.