Digital Reflectarray Considerations for Terrestrial Millimeter-Wave Imaging

We investigate how realistic architecture considerations affect the performance of wafer-scale electronically scanned millimeter-wave reflectarrays. Considering the application of a confocal Gregorian optics geometry with a small angular field of view, we examine how a reflectarray´s discrete (digital) phase state quantization and electrical size impact scan angle accuracy and quantization lobe performance degradation. We quantify the impact of these effects on the camera´s imaging performance and show that, for these reflectarrays, phase quantization of 2 bits is sufficient.