Additive Manufacturing of Steerable Antenna Systems for 5G and Adaptive Cruise Control Applications

This chapter gives an insight view of the evolving additive manufacturing technology and its application for designing steerable front-end (FE) array antenna architecture dedicated to mmWave for the 5G network and the adaptive cruise control (ACC) applications. The manufacturing of RF system is a challenging work because it comes with complex designs, a long realization time, and high cost as well as weight. Technically, all these challenges could be addressed up with the use of additive manufacturing technology. It allows an increased flexibility in the manufacturing of complex designs such as steerable beamforming and other advanced RF products. Traditional machining technologies used to manufacture RF products are limited in their ability to produce complex shape. The AM technology allows to realize the entire designs in one single time-phase which positively impacts mass, cost, realization time, assembly quality and RF performance.