An one-drive-four wireless high voltage high speed controller system used in 100°/8 ms MEMS rotary actuator for antenna array

Abstract

In order to support rapid beamforming, this paper presents an one-drive-four wireless high voltage high speed controller for micro-electromechanical system (MEMS) rotary actuator antenna array. The target antenna array consists of 225 rotatable antennas with controller and achieves >25.0 dBi gain with below −20 dB side lobe and below −20 dB cross polarization in simulation. Each rotatable antenna, which is called actuator, can rotate from 0° to 100° depending on the voltage it received from 1 to 150 V respectively. The correspondingly high voltage is provided by the wireless high voltage high speed controller. To facilitate array installation, it is preferred to control each rotatable antennas wirelessly and reduce controller’s number. Therefore, this paper proposes a wireless multiplexing control scheme to support control voltages from 1 to 150 V to each rotatable antenna in a less than 8 ms settling time. To prove the concept, the proposed MEMS rotary actuator antennas is processed and the one-drive-four wireless high voltage controller has been designed and fabricated with a size of 15 × 10 × 15 mm3 to control four independent antennas simultaneously by ‘time division multiplexing’ method. Measurement results suggest that the MEMS rotary actuator achieves 100°/8 ms settling time with the equally high speed wireless voltage controller. The control voltage accuracy for the rotation at 150 V is less than 8‰, which greatly support rapid beamforming.