Mm-Wave Beam Steering Antenna Based on Extended Hemispherical Lens Antenna Subarrays

A mm-wave beam steering antenna based on lens antenna subarrays (LASs) is presented. Different from the recent work, the antenna employs extended hemispherical dielectric lenses and achieves 2D beam steering. To maximize the scan range with minimum number of antennas (M), the solution of the disk covering problem is employed to find initial positions of the feed antennas. A new design procedure is developed to maximize the scan range and reduce side lobes with systematically employed 3D full-wave simulation based parametric sweeps on lens geometry and feed antenna positions. Compared to the conventional planar phased array antenna occupying the equivalent aperture (L _* M elements), the presented antenna utilizes a single phase shifter per lens (L) to reduce the hardware complexity. It is demonstrated that the presented antenna performs with the largest scan range and low side lobe level (SLL) compared to previous subarray-based antenna arrays. Specifically, the antenna operates at 38 GHz with L = 7, M = 17 and provides 12.8% S₁₁ <; -10 dB, 19.8 dBi peak realized gain, a scan range of 80° and SLL below -9 dB.