Wideband Beamformer

Future surveillance radars need to be more agile to identify and track increasingly complex targets. To meet this need, radars that can emit and receive many independently scanned beams will be required. Furthermore, the scanning must be two dimensional and operate over wide bands. One row of 16 elements forming eight independent beams will be developed, constructed and tested to demonstrate the feasibility of building larger arrays. The wideband beamformer can be extended to a 16X16 array. The beamformer can form eight or more independently scanned transmit and receive beams, each capable of scanning over a +/-60 degrees range in azimuth and elevation plane. The one row of Phase II hardware will also demonstrate azimuth scanning. The beamformer has an open architecture design that places no limit on the size of the array. The unit can be built with current MMIC technology using multi-chip modules. Greater degrees of MMIC integration will result in low cost. The beamformer has a novel design with active power dividers/combiners that have>30dB isolation over active bandwidths.Dual polarization capability can be added in the future. The hardware may have application to ECM and high-rate data links as well as radar.