Thin Transmitarray Panel with full 360-degree Phase Shift Range

This paper presents a new design technique to reduce the thickness of the transmitarray (TA) panel while maintaining 360 o phase shift range. Two types of unit cells, the receive-transmit unit cell and the frequency selective surface (FSS) unit cell, are placed in the same aperture. Comparing to the existing ultra-thin TA designs of similar panel thickness, the presented TAs do not suffer from the phase quantization loss and achieve better aperture efficiency. This study proves that it is viable to mix different types of TA unit cells to design a TA. The developed TA shows better gain than a homogeneous TA using the same elements and improved the overall efficiency by 60%. To verify the design concept, one TA with central frequency at 13.3 GHz was designed, fabricated and measured. The measured gain is 21.3 dBi and the calculated aperture efficiency of the TA is 37.9%.