Automated Pixelated Unit Cell Design for Reflectarray Antennas and Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces

In this paper we demonstrate an automated simulation process using Ansys's High Frequency Structures Simulator (HFSS) tool and MATLAB to generate unit cell configurations for specific phase distributions required for reflectarray antenna and reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) designs. While this technique can be extended to any unit cell topology this paper focuses on randomly generated pixelated unit cells. The random pixelization is generated using MATLAB which is then fed to HFSS to evaluate the cell's reflected wave amplitude and phase. The phase values are screened to ensure that their corresponding reflected wave amplitudes are in the order of 90% before storing the cell configuration in a design database.