Compact Substrate Integrated Waveguide Reflectarray/Transmitarray for 5G Communications

This paper introduces a design of compact size perforated reflectarray/transmitarray based on the substrate integrated waveguide technology (SIW) for 5G communications at 28 GHz. The proposed SIW reflectarray antenna has advantages in compact size, easy fabrication and high gain and reduces the size of the antenna. The unit-cell element consists of the dielectric block with four drilled holes and array of metallic pins on both sides. The SIW metallic pins reduce the total dimensions of the unit-cell element by 40% compared to that of the conventional cell. A peak gain of 23.7 dBi is achieved by side lobe level of 19.7 dB beneath the primary lobe. To overcome the blocking effect in the reflectarray operation due to the presence of the feeding horn in the same direction with the reflected beam, the SIW trasmitarray is designed. It consists of 13×13 unit-cell elements with the metallic pins arranged on the two sides of each unit-cell element. A high gain of 24.22 dBi, with I-dB gain bandwidth of 15.18% is achieved. The finite integration technique is used to analyze the perforated SIW reflectarray Itransmitarray.