Phased Array Antennas for Satellite Applications

Funding Agency: KACST- National Center for Electronics and Photonics Technology

Status: Completed (October 2016)

Due to current advancement in fabrication and circuit packaging technologies, now it is possible to integrate several PCBs layers in a compact shape single package. Therefore, fabrication and characterization feasibility of large scale multilayers circuits allow designing of high performance microwave and millimeters wave systems with their desired specifications. Phased array antennas are one of the key technologies of the modern radio frequency (RF) systems developed using these advanced technologies. RF front ends developed using phased array antennas can improve wireless system’s efficiency to a manifold factors. In fact, phased arrays allow for electronic beam steering, and result in an N² increase in the effective radiated power and N increase in the receive area as compared to a single radiating element, which leads to a significant RF link improvement. The design of a moderate size broadband phased array antenna covering the whole spectrum of satellite communication is challenging since stake up of several PCB circuits having inhomogeneous dielectric constants is involved. Moreover, when we talk about multilayers stake up of PCBS operating at satellite communication bands, the available robust and low loss substrate materials are very limited which make the design of antenna array more challenging. We propose a compact size array antennas to be integrated with GaAs and SiGe based low noise amplifier and phase shifter to develop a novel wideband phased array system for satellite communication.

Fig .1 Antenna array panel for 8×8 phased array system.