Fixed and Reconfigurable Lens-Array and Reflectarray Antennas and Their Applications in Beam-Steering
Speaker: Dr. Abbas Abbaspour-Tamijani,
Founder and President, Freeform Wave Technologies, LLC, Scottsdale, Arizona
Associate Professor Research, Electrical Engineering, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona
Thursday, March 31 at 4:00PM,
UCF, Harris Corp. Engineering Center, Room 450
ABSTRACT:
Research on integrated circuit phased-array transceivers for millimeter-wave applications has seen major progress in the past few years as many groups from both industry and academia have demonstrated IC-based phased arrays for frequencies up to 60 GHz. However, practical limitations such as die size, RF losses of on-chip transmission lines and power dividers/combiners, and DC power consumption pose serious obstacles in scaling these designs for arrays with more than 1632 elements. Quasi-optical beam-forming concepts based on lens-array and reflectarray antennas offer economical alternatives to active phased arrays in applications where high directivity is required. Since lens-arrays and reflectarrays are fully passive and remain highly efficient even when scaled to large electrical dimensions, they can be used to substitute or complement phased arrays for implementing highly directive and efficient beam-steering solutions. Reconfigurable lens-arrays and reflectarrays composed of multi-phase unit cells with integrated MEMS switches or other tuning elements are also highly attractive for satellite and space applications. In this talk we review some electronically-steerable antenna designs based on lens-arrays and reflectarrays, detail the design principles of a special class of these devices based on antenna-filter-antenna elements, and discuss some of its MEMS-based variants for implementing reconfigurable aperture antennas.
BIOGRAPHY:
Dr. Abbaspour-Tamijani is the founder and president of Freeform Wave Technologies, LLC, Scottsdale, AZ, and an associate research professor of electrical engineering at Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ. He received his B.S. and M.S. degrees from The University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran, in 1994 and 1997, respectively, and his Ph.D. degree from The University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, in 2003, all in electrical engineering. From 1996 to 1999, he worked in industry as an Antenna and RF Engineer. In 2004, he was a Research Fellow with the Radiation Laboratory, The University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and an RF Engineer at Motia Inc., Pasadena, California. Later that year, he joined ASU as an assistant professor of electrical engineering. His research focuses on novel device concepts for reconfigurable radio systems including beam-steerable and reconfigurable antennas, wideband tunable filters, RF MEMS, and applications of microwaves in bio-telemetry and neural interfacing. His research is funded by NSF, NIH, DARPA, NASA, and industry. He was the recipient of a DARPA Young Faculty Award in 2008. He is a senior member of the IEEE and a member of the Microwave Theory and Techniques Society, Antennas and Propagation Society, and Engineering in Biology and Medicine Society.
Organizer: Siamak Ebadi, AP/MTT Chapter Chair, IEEE Orlando Section,
Email: ebadi@ieee.org, Phone: 407-802-6563