Piezo-Electric Passive Two-Port MMW Phase-Shifter

The FLAPS antenna is a printed circuit array of varying length dipoles which forms a phased-array surface with the ability to scatter incident RF in any desired steering direction and shaping. To date Malibu Research has used this technique in a variety of fixed-beam antenna applications (Examples are shown herein). It is particularly effective at 35 GHz and 94 GHz. We have shown analytically that small modulations in the thickness of the printed circuit substrate results in a compolete 360o variation in the local RF or ordinary ceramic piezo-electric materials such as PZT. The a FLAPS dipole (array of dipoles) printed on a slab of piezo-electric material, locally excited by a simple voltage, forms the basis of a very low-cost, low-loss millimeter wave electronically steered phased array. Furthermore ceramic piezoelectrics are very inexpensive to manufacture, especially in slab form. Our proposal addresses both a piezoelectric reflective MMW phase shifter as well as a conformal, lenses phase shifter configuration with application to a 5" guided projectile. Under the proposed Phase I SBIR effort such a piezoelectric phase-shifter mini-array will be analyzed, built, and tested. If successful the resulting phase-shifter array costs would (finally) make electronic scan antennas affordable for commercial markets.