A Compound Reconfigurable Solid State Planar Plasma Antenna

Abstract

In today’s modern wireless era, reconfigurable antennas play a vital role for functioning under selective frequency bands, different polarizations and radiation patterns according to the users’ application. This article, gives an insight on solid state plasma planar compound reconfigurable antenna for military radar applications at X-band by using array of Lateral PIN (LPIN) diodes. Silicon-dioxide (SiO2) is used as substrate and proximity coupled feeding technique is chosen to avoid biasing problem in LPIN diodes and also to have compatibility with processing on a standard silicon process. The proposed antenna comprises of a square metallic patch placed above the substrate with linear array of LPIN diodes at adjacent sides of patch to provide fine and coarse tuning in frequency over the range of 8-12 GHz and LPIN diodes placed in the ground plane to provide pattern reconfiguration. Hence, the antenna with compound reconfigurability converges to a solution, where a single antenna satisfies the needs for multiple applications.