The aim of this project is to design a cost-effective planar Maxwell fish-eye lens in PCB technology operating at the center frequency 5 GHz with a bandwidth of 20 %. An approach to design a cost-effective lens is to use a metasurface, which is commonly realized as a periodic structure of unit cells. In this project, a study was made by comparing different unit cells and considering the effect of applying glide symmetry to the unit cells. Comparing different unit cells withand without glide symmetry demonstrates that glide symmetry is necessary to achieve a 20 % bandwidth. Introducing glide symmetry showed a reduction in dispersive behavior, an increaseof isotropy and effective refractive index. Simulations of the full lens show a functioning lens with a power transfer of 67 % at 5.46 GHz. In conclusion, glide symmetry will improve the performance of the lens and is necessary to fulfill the requirement of a 20 % bandwidth.

With the rise of high frequency communication systems such as 5G, new types of antennas has to be developed in order to meet the new requirements. In recent years, lens antennas made of periodic structures has been shown to have desirable performance when increasing operational frequency without increasing the size of the antennas. One way of manufacturing the lenses for the antennas are with 3D printers loaded with dielectrics with specified permittivity. This project group studied the process of designing and manufacturing a flat Maxwell fish eye lens at 5 GHz with a bandwidth of 3.5 GHz to 6 GHz. The resulting design is a lens based on a periodic configuration of cuboid unit cells made from dielectrics which consisted of a hole. By choosing the ratio of dielectric and holes in the unit cells, each part of the lens could be tuned to achieve a specific effective refractive index required for realising the Maxwell fish eye lens.