Effects of Low-Geometrical-Precision PCB Manufacturing on mmWave Passive Metasurfaces

As millimeter-wave (mmWave) signals suffer from high path loss and blocking, passive metasurface reflectors that can be fabricated with conventional PCB manufacturing become a promising cost-effective candidate for enhancing mmWave mobile service coverage. In this work, we show how PCB fabrication geometrical precision affects the performance of passive reflectors that are used in 5G and beyond mmWave networks. With the broad beamwidth of PCB-based metasurfaces, the dimension tolerance of PCB manufacturing can be traded off between cost benefits and key communications performance. From our numerical results based on full-wave simulations, the received power at the design anomalous angle is not significantly affected by the geometrical precision while high errors can cause higher interference at specular and mirror angles. However, the fabrication error in unit cell shape rotation does not influence the received power at the design anomalous, specular and mirror angles.