Reconfigurable Planar Electromagnetic Lens Array Modeling for Fast Performance Evaluation

Planar electromagnetic (EM) lenses are thin devices usually comprising sub-wavelength unit cell elements that synthesize a certain phase delay profile to focus the energy at a specific distance from the lens focal length. The design of these planar EM lenses unit cell elements is usually performed by means of full-EM simulation and optimization software. However, the full-EM simulation of the whole planar EM lens for its performance verification has an extremely large computational complexity, as well as it requires a very long simulation time. A mathematical model which describes the behavior of a planar EM lens array based on the characteristics of the EM lens unit cell elements is described in this paper. After that, this model is employed to benchmark the performance of a planar EM lens array based on a reconfigurable transmit array unit cell element, verifying the ability of the lens to reconfigure the focus characteristics to better deal with different incident angles ranges.