A Beamwidth and Steering Reconfigurable Active Integrated Metasurface Antenna for Dynamic Radiation Control

In this article, a beamwidth and pattern-steering reconfigurable active integrated antenna (AiA) is proposed and studied in 2.4 GHz band. Two low noise amplifiers (LNAs) are applied as the switches to control the beamwidth in this work. Owing to their high ON/OFF state transmission ratio, using amplifiers as switches is an economic and easy way to realize excellent reconfigurability. An aperture coupled metasurface contributes to a unified radiation pattern and reflection coefficient. To highlight the applications, a pair of switchable phase shifters is cascaded to the amplifiers to realize beam steering. The coupling scheme of the AiA is illustrated, which exhibits a quasi-duplex communication function. Power compression and third-order intermodulation of the AiA are discussed and measured. The impedance bandwidth fully covers the range from 2.2 to 2.7 GHz. The measured tunable range of the beamwidth is from 111° to 32°, and the beam steering angle is from − 39° to 36° in the E-plane. The measured peak system gain is 14.7 dBi, while under the passive mode, it is 6.8 dBi. The peak system efficiency is measured up to 220% for the active mode and 80% for the passive mode. The peak power added efficiency (PAE) of the active mode is 40.4%. The measurement results agree well with the simulation.