2-Bit Wideband Electronically Controlled Reconfigurable Phased Array With Wide-Angle Beam-Scanning Capacity

In this article, a 2-bit wideband electronically controlled reconfigurable phased array with wide-angle beam-scanning capacity is proposed. Based on the current reversal mechanism and real-time delay design, a wideband 2-bit phase shifter is designed by cascading a wideband 180° phase shifter and a wideband 90° phase shifter. Then, a wideband 2-bit element is established by connecting the radiation area of the Vivaldi structure at the slot line of the phase shifter, and a metasurface slab with H-shaped metal layer is introduced to improve the scanning performance. Further, a planar wideband reconfigurable 2-bit array at 17 GHz has been designed and fabricated based on this element, and a stripline-based 1:16 power divider with the phase-shifting function is designed to simulate the space-fed spherical wave to avoid high sidelobe. Measured and simulated results are in good agreement. The measured results indicate that the main beam of the array can scan from $-{\mathrm {73}}^{\circ }$ to 73° at 17 GHz by appropriately controlling the state of PIN diodes, and the gain fluctuation is only 2.18 dB. The measured 3 dB gain bandwidth of the array in the broadside direction is about 29.1% (from 14.7 to 19.7 GHz). The wide-angle scanning and wideband performances are verified.