Ku Band Active Transmitarray Based on Microwave

Phase Shifters
Alfonso Muoz-Acevedo1, Pablo Padilla2, Manuel Sierra-Castaer3
Grupo de Radiacin, Departamento de Seales, Sistemas y Radiocomunicaciones, Universidad Politcnica de Madrid
Avenida Complutense s/n, 28040, Madrid, Espaa
1

alfonso@gr.ssr.upm.es
ppadilla00@gr.ssr.upm.es
3
m.sierra.castaner@gr.ssr.upm.es
2

Abstract The aim of this paper is to introduce a novel 12

GHz radiating design based on the idea of active
transmitarray.
This structure is a kind of intelligent antenna which
consists of two radio interfaces connected through
microwave circuitry. A feeding horn is placed in front of
the RX radio interface, which is illuminated by an incident
wave. The intermediate circuits act on the received
electromagnetic signal and conduct it towards the TX
radio interface. Here, the electromagnetic waves are resent
to open space in the form of propagating wave with
specific characteristics.
In this paper we present an operating prototype. Relevant
measurements of the subsystems as well as complete
system measurements are shown and discussed.

B. Subsystems Implementation
The radio interfaces are bidimensional arrays. Both TX and
RX arrays have the same hierarchical structure. The radio
array is constructed with N2 independent radiating cells
forming a NxN radiating cells square. As well, each radiating
cell is a square sub-array of 4 radiating elements separated
07 0. Thus, the global separation between radiating cells is
140. Each radiating element is a broadband multilayer
microstrip antenna working at 12 GHz. Design keys were
taken from [4]. We can see a scheme of the radio interface in
figure 2.

I. INTRODUCTION
A. Idea of Transmitarray
A transmitarray is a novel structure whose function consists
of changing a propagating wave into another with particular
new features (spherical to plane wave translation, new
steering direction, etc.).
Our structure is constructed with microwave subsystems
designed to work at 12 GHz. These subsystems are two radio
interfaces and microwave circuitry which connects them. In
this way, one radio interface (RX) works as back end while
the other one (TX) acts as front end. The RX interface is
illuminated with a feeding horn whose phase centre is placed
at 120 mm from the interface.
The transmitarray scheme is presented in figure 1.

Fig. 2 Parts of a radio interface

The microwave circuitry requires electronically controlled

analog phase shifters, which have been designed and
constructed in microstrip technology.
II. THEORETICAL BASIS
The construction of an active transmitarray will lead us to
demonstrate that radiation pattern reconfiguration is possible
with this kind of intelligent antenna.

Fig. 1 Schematic idea of transmitarray

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A. Wave Sampling
One first step is to sample the horn radiation pattern with
the radiating cells in the RX radio interface. Therefore, we
have spatially-sampled radiation in N2 points.
A spherical pattern reaches the RX radio interface. As the
interface is plane and the incident wave received has a
spherical distribution, a non negligible phase shift is obtained
to each radiation sample because of the different path length
from the feeding horn to each cell. This can be solved with
spherical to plane wave error correction, as in [1] and [8].
B. Signal Processing
The processing of the sampled wave consists of weighing
and phase modification for each one of these samples
individually, sending the processed wave sample to the
corresponding radiating cell in the TX radio interface, as in
[11].
The Wm,n weight set to each port is a complex number with
amplitude and phase information. The processing introduced
in this work is only based on phase variation, so all the
complex weights Wm,n will have a common amplitude value.
According to this, the architecture of the described
transmitarray is shown in figure 3.

Once we have a homogeneous phase distribution, we are

able to carry out radiation pattern synthesis [2]. According to
array theory, we can see in formula 1 that a progressive phase
variation is required to point to p with a d-spaced linear
phased array, where k is the free-space propagation constant.

sin ( p ) =

k d

Formula 1. Phased array steering

We can separate the 2-dimensions matrix of weights Wm,n

into two orthogonal linear phased distributions with x and
y progressive phases, as we can see in figure 4.

Fig. 4 Two orthogonal linear phased distributions

This way, the weights Wm,n can be expressed as shown in

formula 2. Cm,n are the spherical wave correction coefficients,
given in table 1. In our case, for the first prototype, N2=9
radiating cells are selected.

W m , n = C m , n e j m x e j n y
Formula 2. Complex weight coefficients
TABLE I
SPHERICAL WAVE CORRECTION COEFFICIENTS

Cm,n
C1,1 ,C1,3, C3,1 ,C3,3
C1,2 ,C2,1, C2,3 ,C2,3

Fig. 3 Architecture of the transmitarray

C2,2

Two common applications of the phase synthesis are the

following:
Spherical to plane wave correction
Radiation pattern synthesis.
The spherical wave correction is the first application in
which the transmitarray works as if it were an electromagnetic
lens. The modification in the phase signal at each
transmitarray cell is introduced by means of electrical length
modification it the transmission microwave devices placed
between the Rx and the TX interfaces. Doing this, we obtain a
homogeneous phase distribution in the radiating cells of the
TX interface and plane wave radiation.

Value
1

e
e

180
j 69

180
j 141

III. PROTOTYPES
We describe the implementation of the
throughout its subsystems.

prototype

A. Radio Interface
Both TX and RX radio interfaces are identical. They have
N2=9 radiating cells of 4 radiating elements each one. In
figure 5 we can see the whole interface with the ground plane
around and a detail of the upper layer of the microstrip
structure. A copper ground plane is placed around in order to

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avoid undesired spillover radiation coming from RX to TX

side. A pen, as a size reference, is attached.
In figure 6, we can see the theoretical |S11| as well as
experimental results for the radiating element. Theoretical and
experimental results depict quite good agreement.
B. Microwave Circuitry
As it was shown, microwave circuitry interconnects RX
and TX radio interfaces. The circuitry devices are based on
different microstrip circuits, designed using [6], [3].

The phase shifters are two-port active circuits which

interconnect a radiating cell access port to its analogous in the
other interface. These phase shifters are reflection-type phase
shifters (RTPS) tuned with varactor diodes, as in [5], [7]. In
figure 8 we can see a prototype of the phase shifter, ready to
be measured in AVR as well as the phase shifters soldered in
the space between radio interfaces. Curves of phase versus
frequency for several control voltages are shown in figure 9.
An alternative active option can be found in [10], and a
different aplication in [9].

Fig. 5 Radio interface

Fig. 8 Details of the phase shifters of the active transmitarray

Fig. 6 S11 coefficient of radiating element.

The most external circuits are power combiners which

arrange radiating elements in groups of four, so the radiating
cell is accessible with a single port. Figure 7 exhibits how
these combiners are soldered behind the ground plane of the
radiating interface. The space between interfaces is used to
connect the analog phase shifters, whose function is to
implement the weight coefficients Wm,n.

Fig. 9 Phase shift curves.

Fig. 7 Power combiners.

C. Operative Prototype
The constructed prototype is shown in figure 10, in the RX
interface side view. A mechanical support is required for the

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feeding horn, as well as a driver circuit in order to control the

phase shifters.
Radiation pattern measurements are carried out in anechoic
chamber, as observed in figure 11.
IV. RESULTS
Two different configurations are set up for radiation pattern
measurements: only spherical wave correction and spherical
wave correction with steering vector of p=10 in one of the
main axes.

B. Dynamical Steering Configuration

Having proved that the prototype is able to generate a
homogeneous phase distribution in the TX radio interface, we
set up the system to point to p=10. According to formula 1,
it is necessary a progressive phase =90 to steer the main
lobe to p=10.
Biasing the phase shifters according to this configuration,
the tridimensional normalized farfield plot in figure 14 is
obtained. The main cuts for =0 and =90 planes can be
found in figure 15, where we observe that our prototype
clearly points to p=10.

A. Spherical wave correction

The first configuration consists of spherical wave
correction, with no main lobe steering. The objective here is to
show that there is a clear main lobe at p=0 with a well
defined radiation pattern. In figure 12 we can observe
normalized gain plots versus for the =0 and =90
planes (main axes). A tridimensional plot of the full
acquisition is shown in figure 13.

Fig. 12 Prototype far field radiation pattern for configuration A.

Fig. 10 Prototype of transmitarray.

Fig. 13 Tridimensional far field radiation pattern plot for phase correction
configuration.

V. CONCLUSIONS

Fig. 11 Prototype in the anechoic chamber.

The radiation patterns show very clear main lobes. The

measured results of steering configuration agree properly with
expected data. Secondary lobes behave as expected,
increasing when varying the active circuits. Some
discrepancies can be explained taking into account

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REFERENCES

inaccuracies in the amplitude value of each Wm,n (losses),

which depends on the control voltage introduced at each cell.
As we can observe in figures 12 15, radiation pattern
reconfiguration as well as spherical wave correction is
achieved with the prototype described. Eventually, these
results show that a transmitarray device is able to work as an
intelligent antenna.

[1]
[2]
[3]
[4]
[5]
[6]
[7]
[8]
[9]
[10]
[11]

Fig. 14 Tridimensional far field radiation pattern plot for 10 tilt

configuration (B).

Fig. 15 Prototype far field radiation pattern normalized cuts for 10 tilt
configuration (B).

ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This work has been carried out in the Radiation group of
the SSR department thanks to two grants of the Government
of Spain. One of them for undergraduate students and the
other one (FPU) for Ph.D. students.
The electromagnetic simulations were accomplished with
CST Microwave Studio 6.0 under a cooperation agreement
between CST and UPM (Technical University of Madrid). NY
substrate used in the prototype was kindly given by NELTEC
S.A.

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