Reduced Size Weight and Power Consumption for SATCOM Antennas

Agile has successfully demonstrated the ability to design and manufacture high performance, voltage controllable analog phase shifters for use in phased array antennas using the ferroelectric material, Barium Strontium Titanate (BST). These phase shifters are inexpensive, reproducible and easy to implement in a circuit using low cost flip chip manufacturing techniques. In addition, the chips do not require hermetic packaging and need only a single DC control line for the device. The phase shifter is currently the major cost driver in phased array systems. Agile is proposing to develop 2-D electronically scanned antennas using as a cost reducer low cost modules containing Agile analog phase shifters, LNA, switching and sample and hold functionality. The core of this cost reduction is the Agile analog controlled phase shifter but Agile has also developed low cost packaging techniques allowing for a low cost, high functionality module. The Phase II proposal will focus on extending our work from the Phase I effort and performing additional design and modeling before building an actual Ku band receive array. Work in Phase II will also include development of a Transmit/Receive module for two way SATCOM applications.