55.2: Invited Paper: Rethinking Wireless Communications: Advanced Antenna Design using LCD Technology

Abstract

For mobile satellite communications applications such as the connected car, a scanning antenna is required. Kymeta has developed a novel, electronically scanned antenna technology achieved through the use of high-birefringence liquid crystals. Kymeta's technology is positioned for mass production by leveraging the manufacturing capabilities of the LC display industry.

Employing Liquid Crystal‐Based Smart Antennas for Satellite and Terrestrial Communication

“…We use the expression smart antenna in the context of ESAs that can point their antenna beam in different directions without any mechanical moving parts. To realize LC smart antennas, different concepts have been proposed in the literature 8‐12 for example, phased‐array antennas, meta surfaces, and reflect‐array antennas. In a phased‐array antenna's transmittal, the incoming RF signal is distributed by the feeding/distribution network to the LC‐based phase shifters, which are connected to the radiating antenna elements.…”

77‐1: Invited Paper: Liquid Crystals beyond Displays: Smart Antennas and Digital Optics

“…For the realization of LC smart antennas three different concepts have been proposed in literature: Phased array antennas [1], metasurfaces [2] and reflectarray antennas [3]. Figure 2 illustrates the general working principle of a phased array antenna.…”

“…The concepts of LC based metasurfaces [2] and reflectarray antennas [3] use in most cases small resonant elements that can be tuned by the LC layer and provide similar beam steering functionality as phased array antennas.…”

2 Bit Reconfigurable Unit-Cell and Electronically Steerable Transmitarray at $Ka$ -Band

“…[4]), and electronically steerable (e.g. [5]- [7]) architectures have been presented as academic or industrial solutions. The existing fully electronically reconfigurable architectures are based on liquid crystal controlled holographic metasurfaces [5], [6] or more importantly on classical phased arrays, e.g.…”