Novel fully electronic active real-time millimeter-wave imaging system based on a planar multistatic sparse array

The interest on active millimeter-wave and microwave imaging systems is increasing nowadays due to their utilization in security, medical, and industrial applications. Imaging systems using monostatic arrays suffer from the high number of antenna positions, making a fully electronic solution very costly and impractical. Multistatic arrays, however, offer the chance for high reduction factors in the number of antennas, and then allow for fully electronic solutions. Here, a new array architecture is presented, which is suitable for real-time operation and is capable of delivering high image quality in means of resolution and dynamic range. An example array is demonstrated for operation from 72 to 80 GHz. The imaging system hardware is introduced, along with imaging results of humans.