Metamaterial Lens for Monopulse Beamforming with a 77-GHz Long-Range Radar

The presented work describes the application of a metamaterial lens for monopulse beamforming in a 77-GHz automotive radar system. For that, a radar frontend with commercially available MMICs was created and run with a lens system designed on a six-layer printed circuit board. Despite the high design frequency and therefore small structure sizes, the fabricated frequency selective surface exhibited very good performance over a broad frequency range. This is thanks to the phase shifting nature of multiple metasurface bandpasses which were extracted efficiently from a novel interpolation procedure. Both, the single bandpasses and the whole lens system in combination with the radar front-end were measured and verified, giving remarkable results, matching the simulations.