Multi-beam Phased-array Antenna Beamformers

The Air Force has identified the need for very large mobile phased array antennas. The expected size of antennas will range from hundreds of elements to greater than 1,000,000 elements. Equivalent high performance beamforming networks are required. The antenna systems will require wide instantaneous bandwidth requiring the beamformers to efficiently implement true time delay processing. Saraswati has developed an optical, multi beam, time delay beamforming network topology, named Corona, that has significant advantages in size, weight, and cost. For very large high bandwidth antennas, most beamformers scale linearly or even as the square of the number of elements. CORONA scales as the square root of the number of elements, resulting in order of magnitude advantages in some cases.