Advances in Phased Array Technology

This paper presents an overview of developments at IMST in the area of steerable antennas, also often referred to as phased arrays. Such type of antennas have become a key area since the last few years. Various activities in this area have been conducted in the past, and are currently ongoing. Phased array antennas are, in general, rather complex systems that have to incorporate special features in order to perform beam steering, and have achieved ever more popularity during the last years, mainly driven by mobile multimedia applications. The complexity of the antenna systems, developed at IMST, ranges from small arrays with switch-able elements, and partially mechanically and electronically steerable arrays (hybrid systems) to fully electronically steerable arrays. Such systems can be equipped with phase and amplitude shifters for each element, or the design can be based on Digital Beam Forming (DBF). At IMST a large number of R&D projects reflects the broad spectrum of activities with respect to design and development of phased arrays. For the last 6 years, various projects have been carried out which all differ in topic, application and frequency range (L-band to Ka-band). It is intended to give here an overview of the work performed, and a global technical description.