3D-Printed Reconfigurable Communication System Based on Tunable Liquid Crystals

This paper presents an additively manufactured communication system for V-Band applications using a <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$2 \times 2$</tex>-antenna array in which each element can be controlled by an individual liquid crystal (LC) based phase shifter. To integrate the anisotropic material into the feed structure, a cavity made of UV-curable photopolymer resin is printed using stereolithography. A targeted beam steering angle of 7° was achieved, while the measured gain of the phased antenna array was between 16.18 dB and 14.02 dB at a center frequency of 62.5 GHz.