Liquid Crystal Based Planar Smart Phased Array

#Antenna #Phased #Array

Speaker: Md. Nazmul Hasan

Liquid crystal is a significantly cheap material used in today’s electronic device display. Using this as a variable permittivity substrate will unlock many significant advances in the field of antenna engineering. Liquid crystal materials change permittivity under electric voltage. But it does not consume any current, hence it consumes zero power. The insertion loss of liquid crystal material is very low compared to commercially available diode-based phase shifters which suffer from poor Q factor at mmwave frequency. On the other hand, by simply changing voltage bias on-the-fly, we can program the phased array to steer the beam in real-time. The variability of permittivity of liquid crystal using voltage bias will convert it into a reconfigurable phase shifter for the smart phased array. The liquid crystal material can be housed within in the same commercial printed circuit board technology infrastructure for the phased array.