Development of Wide-Band Planar Active Array Antenna System for Electronic Warfare

This paper describes the development and measurement results of a wide-band planar active phase array antenna system for an electronic warfare jamming transmitter. The system is designed as an 8×8 triangular lattice array using a 45° slant wide-band antenna. The 64-element transmission channel is composed of a wide-band gallium nitride(GaN) solid state power amplifier and a gallium arsenide(GaAs) multi-function core chip(MFC). Each GaAs MFC includes a true-time delay circuit to avoid a wide-band beam squint, a digital attenuator, and a GaAs drive amplifier to electronically steer the transmitted beam over a ±45° azimuth angle and ±25° elevation angle scan. Measurement of the transmitted beam pattern is conducted using a near-field measurement facility. The EIRP of the designed system, which is 9.8 dB more than the target EIRP performance(P), and the ±45° azimuth and ±25° elevation beam steering fulfill the desired specifications.