Design of sub-THz beam scanning antenna using luneburg lens for 5G communications or beyond

Abstract

This work presents the design and simulation of a beam scanning antenna at 300 GHz using Luneburg lens for 5th generation communication applications or beyond. The basic antenna consists of a highly directional Yagi-Uda antenna with lens shaped configuration (substrate lens antenna-SLA) and designed using multiple parallel elements such as one reflector and one driven element with 6 directors. The SLA is focused by Luneburg lens, which is modeled using a unique foam material AirexR82 with relative dielectric constant of 1.12, and it is pressed to realize different dielectric constants in order to obey the index law inside the lens. The final nine-element array of SLA integrated with Luneburg lens provides a 50% increase in bandwidth compared with conventional Yagi-Uda antenna along with an increase in the gain of 31.3% compared with single SLA. The designed model can achieve a beam scan coverage up to 146◦ with a maximum gain of 17.1 dBi and an estimated efficiency of 92.9%. The beam scanning antenna provides a wide bandwidth of 83 GHz starting from 289 GHz to 372 GHz. The analysis of the proposed antenna is done in CST suite and is validated using HFSS software.