SbD-Based Synthesis of Low-Profile WAIM Superstrates for Printed Patch Arrays

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel design method for low-profile superstrates in phased array antennas, improving wide-angle impedance matching and stability using a System-by-Design approach with optimization and semi-analytical modeling.

Contribution

It presents a new SbD-based synthesis method combining global optimization and semi-analytical modeling for designing multi-layer WAIM superstrates with diverse materials.

Findings

Effective design of multi-layer structures demonstrated

Improved ARL stability across scanning angles shown

Flexible to different substrate and lattice configurations

Abstract

An innovative strategy for the design of low-profile wide-angle impedance matching (WAIM) superstrates to active return loss (ARL) stability of scanned microstrip-printed periodic phased arrays (PPAs) is presented. Towards this end, an instance of the System-by-Design (SbD) paradigm is exploited and a task-oriented formulation of the WAIM synthesis problem is proposed. More specifically, a customized global optimization strategy is combined with an accurate and fast modeling of the array ARL, which is based on a semi-analytical approach, to enable an effective design of multi-layer structures with both isotropic and anisotropic materials. A set of representative numerical examples, concerned with different microstrip patch substrates, lattices, and design constraints, is presented to give the interested readers some insights on the features and the potentialities of the proposed implementation.