A Wideband Circularly Polarized Transmitarray Antenna for Millimeter-Wave Applications

A wideband circularly polarized (CP) transmitarray antenna (TA) is presented for millimeter-wave applications. First, a wideband CP TA element is designed by combining two wideband antennas, one of which is a linearly polarized (LP) magnetoelectric (ME) dipole antenna and the other is a CP antenna with orthogonal electric-dipole mode and patch mode. Both of the two antennas are fed by a probe from the center of the unit cell, thus the CP antenna can be rotated freely to realize the required phase shift. Then a CP TA with 15 × 15 elements is designed based on the unit cell proposed here. To excite the proposed TA, a fully-metallic ME-dipole-based antenna array featuring wide operating bandwidth with a low profile and ease for assembling is used as the source antenna. Finally, by integrating the CP TA with the source antenna, a prototyped millimeter-wave CP TA is designed, fabricated and measured. Experimental results show that the gain of the proposed CP TA is up to 25.6 dBic at 33 GHz with a peak aperture efficiency of 44%. The 3-dB gain bandwidth is 33.8% and the axial ratio (AR) is smaller than 2 dB within a bandwidth of 37.5% from 26 to 38 GHz.