Design of more affordable and reliable electronically-steered phased arrays

Recent fundamental results (Speciale, 1996) in the theory of linear, multi-port networks enable cost-effective, higher-reliability designs for electronically-steered phased arrays. The referenced paper documents and proves that, by including a properly designed beam-forming network, it becomes possible to feed an array and steer its beam, using a much reduced number of expensive and critical phase- and amplitude-controlled sources, while at the same time completely eliminating the adverse effects of element coupling. Those new results are based on a generalization of the classical concepts of scalar image impedance, and of scalar image-transfer function for two-port networks, to the new concepts of multidimensional image-impedance matrix, and of multidimensional image-transfer function matrix for linear multi-port networks.