Ultra-wideband conformal apertures with digital beamforming for UHF to millimeter-wave applications

This paper presents a reconfigurable low profile ultra-wideband (UWB) phased array, having as much as 14.1:1 instantaneous bandwidth suitable for UHF to millimeter wave applications, with unprecedented integrated digital beam-forming capability across the entire bandwidth. To realize spectrum efficiency, aperture reconfiguration is also proposed. That is, the system is tuned at the feed network rather than the aperture of the antenna by introducing switches and LC loads. Further, the proposed UWB phased array significantly reduces cost due to its novel on-site encoding for tracking individual array element signals to eliminate hardware phased shifters, a primary cost component of the phased arrays.