A very thin and compact smart skin x-band digital beamforming antenna

In this paper, we present a very thin and compact (7xi27x125mm³) broadband (8.0-9.7GHz) concept demonstrator module for a frequency agile smart skin digital heamforming antenna. It includes 16 microstrip antenna elements placed in a 4x4 square lattice on the front-side of the module and 16 on-chip receivers, including tunable image rejection filters on-chip, mounted on the back-side. Even though a relatively small-sized array is used, measured results show a promising performance, for example, in terms of the values of side-lohe rejection and jamming suppression. The results also demonstrate the possibility to reduce size and complexity of array antennas.