Real-time mode switching and beam scanning of high-gain OAM waves using a 1-bit reconfigurable reflectarray antenna

Abstract

A reconfigurable electromagnetic surface has been studied to realize the adjustable orbital angular momentum (OAM) beams for real-time wireless communication and dynamic target detection in the future. OAM mode switching realized by many previous designs suffers from low gains without OAM beam scanning. In this article, a 1-bit reconfigurable reflectarray antenna is designed, fabricated, and tested for the real-time control of OAM mode switching and large-angle vortex beam scanning in three-dimensional space. The proposed reflectarray surface is composed of 1-bit electronically reconfigurable cells, and the size is 24 λ × 24 λ with 2304 units. The reconfigurable element is designed by using a radiation patch loading a PIN diode with effective control of two states, “ON” and “OFF”, for the demand of 180◦ phase difference. The reflectarray surface can be assigned to a code sequence of 0 or 1 by the Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) in real time. Henceforth, the coding surface can dynamically control the generation of high-gain OAM beams, where only the optimized phase distributions on the surface need to be changed according to demand. To verify the concept, a large-scale reflectarray surface is fabricated and measured with an oblique feed at 15◦. Different OAM-carrying phase distributions for different OAM beam states are calculated and tested. The test results show that the OAM mode switching between l = 1 and l = 2 is realized, and other variable modes such as l = 3 or l = 5 can also be achieved by modifying the phase encoding sequence. Furthermore, the direction of the vortex beams can be accurately controlled with gains over 20 dBi, and the large-angle vortex beam scanning is verified. Therefore, all results demonstrate that the proposed 1-bit reconfigurable reflectarray is efficient for the regulation and control of OAM-carrying beams for the demand of real-time dynamic wireless communications in the future.