Compact, Polarization Preserving Antennas for the 40-200 GHz Frequency Range

Electronically steered antenna arrays capable of forming multiple beams enable tracking and concurrent sensing of multiple, spatially diverse targets, thus providing significant advantage over dish antennas that have fixed, narrow beam patterns. To address the needs of the DoD, such antenna arrays must demonstrate high gain, low noise figure, and ultra-wideband operation. We have identified the antipodal Vivaldi antenna on LCP substrate as a prime candidate to fulfill these multiple stringent requirements. This antenna structure is compact, ultra-wideband, amenable to fabrication using well-established processes, and readily integrated into high channel count arrays. Phase Sensitive Innovations has considerable experience designing and fabricating these and other antennas and will leverage this experience to deliver the needed antennas for the 40-200 GHz frequency range. Beyond that, we have also developed a powerful receiver technology that will complement the antenna development effort and provide significant benefits over traditional techniques for beam forming and processing of received signals. Our imaging receiver technology inherently forms thousands of concurrent beams with an improved sensitivity as compared to conventional receiver approaches. Moreover, most aspects of the our approach have already been proven through recent demonstrations of a TRL6 77 GHz passive video-rate imager developed for helicopter brown-out mitigation.