Wideband Phased Array Antenna Design with Fragmented Combiner Technology

In this work, a novel fragmented combiner network is designed to excite a planar phased array antenna, comprised of 4x4 elements with a single RF port (i.e. 16:1). The antenna system, intended for receive (Rs) applications, was engineered with ultra-wideband (UWB) performance that covers portions of the L-, S-, and C-bands. The unit cell design consists of a printed circuit board (PCB) stack-up with a driven aperture layer that is DC connected with a single metal pin to a fragmented combiner layer. This single connection indicates that the antenna is unbalanced and therefore no balun or differential amplifier is required. Additionally, there are no vias required for this unbalanced array, allowing for this concept to be easily scaled to lower or higher frequencies. Further, the fragmented combiner is a PCB-based component, which eliminates the need for traditional commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) components e.g. Wilkinson chips for this specific application. The simulated results of this unbalanced phased array with a fragmented combiner network are discussed and experimentally validated.