Passive Reflectarrays on Quartz Glass / in Chip Technology

Whereas the elements of conventional antenna arrays are fed by transmission lines, reflectarrays are excited in free space; for example, the array is illuminated by a horn antenna. Reflectarrays can bundle the incident beam or reflect it in a different direction that does not correspond to the principle “incident angle = reflection angle” known from optics. When considering passive structures (as in this work), the reflectarray is set to an arbitrary, but fixed, incident and reflection angle.

In the context of this work, reflectarrays with an operating frequency of 240 GHz will be considered. The phase distribution on the array, which is related to beam forming, is achieved by geometric variation of the unit cells.

Possible topics on the system level concern the modeling of parasitic effects and investigations on the array synthesis of arrays that are not fully populated. Based on theoretical investigations, structures shall be designed, a demonstrator shall be built and characterized by measurements.