4 W 8 Patch Array-Fed FR4-Based Transmit Array Antennas for Affordable and Reliable 5G Beam Steering

This paper presents a novel method of designing affordable 28-GHz transmit array antennas utilizing FR4 substrates, which are low-cost but lossy. It is demonstrated that low insertion loss can be achieved by employing appropriate combinations of spatial filter unit cells, where each unit cell is selected to minimize the loss factors defined by lossy spatial filter modeling. The loss factor with inter-layer couplings was found to be more variable than that without inter-layer couplings, although inter-layer couplings have previously been utilized to increase the tunable range of the phase shift. Therefore, the number of metal layers in the low-pass spatial filter more affected by the inter-layer coupling is selected to be less than the number of metal layers used in the bandpass spatial filter for a given thickness in the proposed method. In addition, a novel transmits array in which some of the unit cells are sinusoidally arranged is described. This can achieve up to 1.6-dB gain enhancement at some steered angles compared with the conventional design. To simulate transmit arrays rapidly, an effective simple medium structure representing a transmit array is presented. Finally, the measured results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed design approaches for affordable transmit array antennas. Only a small difference of 0.8 dB between the simulated and measured results confirms the successful manipulation of the lossy characteristic of FR4.