Alcan Systems Gmbh

Merck Patent Gmbh

Technische Universitat Darmstadt

Onur Hamza Karabey

Rolf Jakoby

Atsutaka Manabe

Felix Gölden

Wenjuan Hu

Felix Goelden

Alexander Gäbler

Muhammed Ayluctarhan

Taimoor Naveed

Zhen Luo

Christian Weickhmann

Rolf Prof Jakoby

A two-dimensional (2-D) beam steerable phased array antenna is presented comprising a continuously electronically steerable material including a tunable material or a variable dielectric material, preferred a liquid crystal material. A compact antenna architecture including a patch antenna array, tunable phase shifters, a feed network and a bias network is proposed. Similar to the LC display, the proposed antenna is fabricated by using automated manufacturing techniques and therefore the fabrication costs are reduced considerably.

Electronically steerable planar phase array antenna

A phase shifting device with a linear transmission line comprises a first electrode and a second electrode that are spaced at a distance from each other. A tunable dielectric material is arranged between the first electrode and the second electrode. The transmission line comprises several overlapping section. An overlapping area of the first electrode overlaps an overlapping area of the second electrode in order to provide a parallel plate capacitor area that affects the phase of an electromagnetic signal that propagates along the transmission line. The first electrode and the second electrode are electrically connected to a bias voltage source with bias electrodes which consist of a material with a lower electrical conductivity that that of the first and second electrode.

RF  phase shifter comprising a differential transmission line having overlapping sections with tunable dielectric material for phase shifting signals

A phased array antenna includes several antenna elements and a signal feed entry from or to which a signal is transmitted to or from the antenna elements. A phase shifting device modifies a phase difference of the signal that is transmitted from the signal feed network to the respective antenna element or that is transmitted from the respective antenna element to the signal feed network to adjust the preferred direction of radiation of the phased array antenna. A bias voltage is applied to each phase shifting device via two bias voltage electrode lines that are connected to a bias voltage driver. The bias voltage driver has several output channel terminal pairs with two output channel terminals to apply a tunable output channel voltage difference to each terminal pair. The two bias voltage electrode lines of each phase shifting device are connected to a respective terminal pair.

Phased array antenna

A phase shift device includes a planar transmission line that is formed by a signal electrode and a ground electrode which are separated by a dielectric substance, whereby the signal electrode of the planar transmission line is divided into several pieces and includes overlapping areas of adjacent pieces that are filled with a tunable liquid crystal material, thereby forming a dielectric tunable component (varactor) with a metal-insulator-metal type capacitor. The several pieces of the signal electrode are arranged at two or more different distance levels with respect to the ground electrode. The tunable liquid crystal material is arranged as a continuous layer between several pieces of the signal electrode that are arranged at two different distance levels.

Phase shift device

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Neu-Isenburg, Germany

Onur Hamza Karabey