Microwave Ferroelectric and Reconfigurable

Antennas
Jozef W. Modelski, Yevhen Yashchyshyn
Warsaw University of Technology, Institute of Radioelectronics
Nowowiejska str., 15/19,00-665 Warsaw, Poland
[email protected]

Abstract- Nowadays, radioelectronic systems employ multiple antenna systems. An intelligent (smart) or adaptive antennas are
the most suitable for wireless communication, especially for 3G and 4G systems. The key property of the intelligent technology is
the ability to respond automatically by changing an appropriate radiation pattern. There are also numerous wireless services that
operate over wide frequency range and demand different operating electrical characteristics, e.g. GSM, GPS, UMTS, WLAN,
Bluetooth, Wimax, and others. Hence, it is not practical to dedicate one antenna for each service. Many of these services are on at a
time, while others may be required to be on all the time. In most cases, they would require automatic switching between these
different modes, bands, polarizations and so on. The best solution will be the possibility for dynamic reconfiguring of the antenna
aperture. Many solutions of the reconfigurable antennas have been described in the literature and their practical applications have
been successfully used in telecommunication systems. In general, the reconfigurable antennas can be divided into two groups: The
first one which uses fixed separated switches placed on the aperture (as switches can be used: PIN diodes, FET transistors or
MEMS); the second one which uses temporarily created switches, e.g. on a semiconductor substrate. An example of the first group
is a reconfigurable aperture concept, derived from fragmented aperture design where the configuration of the fragmented aperture
may be switched by the user to obtain different functionalities [1], [2]. These reconfigurable apertures are derived from a new class
of antennas, which consist of a matrix of conducting patches with switches between some or all of the patches. These reconfigurable
apertures can change functionality by opening or closing different connections between these patches. An example of the second
group is the plasma regions with fairly high electrical conductivity, which are temporarily created on a silicon substrate [3], [4].
These regions define the antenna structure, and they can be changed to create different antennas. The key element of the antenna,
which has been presented, e.g. in [4], is a semiconductor chip that contains a set of individually controlled PIN structures [5].
Electromagnetic waves propagate through the chip, which also serves as a planar dielectric waveguide. The PIN structures locally
affect the wave propagation velocity, and the antenna can form a beam in practically any direction within a wide steering angle
(like a leaky-wave antenna) [6].

The first investigations of the reconfigurable antennas, which are carried out at our Institute [7], show the extensive
functionalities of this type of antenna. First of all, the reconfigurable antenna can be used as the conventional frequency scanning
antenna. It is easy to see, that the reconfigurable antenna can direct radiation beam to desire direction. The first additional
possibility in comparison with the conventional waveguide slot antenna, is that the reconfigurable antenna can be used for
operating at one frequency, but with generating two or more different radiation patterns at different moments. The second
extending possibility of the presented reconfigurable antenna is that the antenna can operate at different frequencies with
supporting radiation in the same direction.
Presented reconfigurable antenna consists of the reconfigurable aperture which is placed on, instead of the narrow wall of a
rectangular waveguide. Aperture consist of a number of the reconfigurable elements which are made as the surface PIN diodes
(SPIN), and are excited by means of an electromagnetic field existing in a waveguide. The main drawback of the presented
electronically reconfigurable antenna concept is fact that the directions of the beam can be chosen in a discrete way. Increasing the
number of the reconfigurable elements causes decreasing of the angle distance between two neighbouring beam directions.
However, some parameters of the SPIN diodes made the limitations of their utilization on microwave.

Advances in several areas of materials science have led to a variety of new materials with strong potential applications to
microwave and millimeter-wave components. The high tunability and low dielectric losses are only the desired properties of
material which can be applied in the tunable micro- and mm-wave devices. Despite the enormous effort made to reduce the cost of
the tunable devices, the desired progress has yet to be achieved. However, as demonstrated recently, a number of the device
configurations are a promising solution to inexpensive steering. A new low-cost scan antenna concept (without phase shifters),
applying ferroelectrics, has been presented in [8].
The property of ferroelectric materials having a dielectric constant which can be modulated at high frequencies, under the effect
of an electric field bias operating perpendicular to the direction of propagation of the signal, is very attractive and can be used to
develop a new family of devices operating in the microwave and mm-wave range. Ferroelectric materials are in many ways dual to
ferromagnetic materials. However, they have a number of advantages over the magnetically controlled ferrites. In ferroelectric, the
driven energy required to change the property of material goes primarily to change in the stored energy and is not dissipated in the
ferroelectric material. As a consequence, less power is required to control the property of material. Ferroelectrics also allow for
faster tuning compared to ferromagnetic materials, they have smaller and lighter structure, and allow for high power capacity.

The electrical scan property permits to expand functional possibilities of the known frequency scan leaky-wave antennas. The
substrate of the presented microstrip antenna has been made using a ceramic–polymer composite with modified ferroelectric
powder Ba0,65Sr0,35TiO3 and an appropriate polymer (grains of the powder were sprayed into polymer with the use of a specific
method). The ceramic–polymer composite was designed to change permittivity in response to an applied electric control field for
antenna utilization. The main advantage of the developed composites over typical ceramic ferroelectric materials is that the first
one is elastic and can have any dimensions (even 1 m ), it has also got a very low permittivity and a high tunability. It allows to
electrically change the phase constant of the propagation wave and, in turn, changes the main beam direction. It has been shown
that the beam angle changes over 300 when the dc-bias field is applied up to 200 V.
The rigorous full-wave analysis of the developed scan antenna on a ferroelectric substrate has taken into account the current
distributions of the first higher order modes, and radiation characteristics have been investigated. The comparison with
experimental results has fully confirmed the usefulness of the scan-antenna concept. Presented results of the electrical scanned
antenna investigation are promising, especially for fixed-frequency operation, where frequency scanning is impossible.

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