Application of Coherently Radiating Periodic Structures for Feeding Subarrays in Limited-Scan Arrays

This paper presents a new design technique to improve the reduction of phase shifters using sub-arrays and CORPS (coherently radiating periodic structures) technology. The CORPS network generates the values of cophasal excitation with reduced input ports. These values feed an optimal sub-arrays structure. Furthermore, fixed and variable amplifiers allow a low SLL (side lobe level) by using a raised cosine amplitude distribution along sub-arrays inputs. The theoretical model of CORPS-Subarrays, numerical and experimental results of several design cases are presented. The proposed design achieves a +/- 14 degrees scanning range with a higher reduction of phase shifters than other techniques presented previously in the state of art. This paper illustrates, as a contribution, the complete antenna system based on the fabrication of a prototype and experimental results to analyze the reduction capacity of phase shifters and scanning possibilities of the proposed methodology in antenna arrays. The experimental results of the BFN (beam-forming networks) prototype at 6 GHz for 11 antenna elements and 3 phase shifters are provided. The proposed design achieves a reduction of 72% of phased shifters with +/- 14 degrees beam scanning and -15 dB of SLL.