Additively Manufactured Flexible Tile-Based Massively Scalable Phased Arrays for 5G+ Enabled Smart Skins and Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces

This talk will discuss a novel tile-based approach to constructing, in a modular fashion, massively scalable MIMO and phased arrays for 5G/B5G mm-wave smart skins and large-area reconfigurable intelligent surfaces for Smart Cities and IoT applications. Fabrication and performance of a proof-of-concept 5G/mm-wave 29GHz 32-element phased array utilizing 2×2“8-element subarray” tiles will be discussed featuring a ±30deg beam steering capability. The unique benefits of the proposed tile approach utilize the fact that tiles of identical sizes can be manufactured in large quantities rather than have arrays of multiple sizes serve various user capacity coverage areas. It must be stressed that the proof-of-concept flexible 2×2 tile array features no performance degradation when it is wrapped around a 3.5cm radius curvature. This topology can be easily scaled up to massively large arrays by simply adding more tiles and extending the feeding network on the mounting tiling layer. The tiles are assembled onto a single flexible substrate which interconnects the RF, DC, and digital traces, allowing for the easy realization of on-demand very large antenna arrays on virtually any practical conformal platform for frequencies up to sub-THz frequency range.