High Power Electronic Beam Steering with Dual-Polarized Reconfigurable Reflectarray

A high-power, reconfigurable, dual-polarized reflectarray element is presented for rapid electronic beam steering. The reflectarray unit cell consists of an all-aluminum cross-dipole placed over a ground plane with inductive pin rails. The uniqueness of this design lies in the use of pin rails to support the dipoles close to the ground plane. This eliminates the need for a dielectric sheet while achieving reflective resonance. The four arms of the unit cell's cross-dipole split the incident power toward four high-power Gallium Nitride (GaN) switches. These switches control the 2-bit phase shifting of the unit cell in the reflectarray. Simulations show that a phase shift from 0° to 360° is achieved, with the unit cell delivering 5–6 dBi gain at the operating frequencies.