A liquid crystal beam former for two dimensional millimeter-wave beam steering

Abstract

A liquid crystal (LC) beam former is a millimeter-wave (MMW) device that can electrically control MMW beam direction and shape by utilizing the feature of LCs that, as in the optical region, permittivity in the MMW range can be varied by application of a control voltage. In a previous design, control of the beam former was limited to one dimension because of the simple structure where LC layers and control electrodes were alternately stacked. In this paper we propose a new structure for two-dimensional beam-steering and shaping where the control electrodes are split into several strips in order to realize a two-dimensional permittivity distribution across the beam former. Experiments are conducted to validate this capability.