Nature-inspired ultra-wideband array synthesis techniques

An overview of current high performance, nature-inspired ultra-wideband antenna array design techniques is given. The polyfractal, raised-power series (RPS), compact direct, and aperiodic tiling methods are discussed, which utilize nature-inspired optimization strategies such as the genetic algorithm or the recently developed covariance matrix adaptation evolutionary strategy. These methods have yielded array layouts which offer operating frequency bandwidths of up to 30:1 and beyond with no grating lobes and very low peak sidelobe levels.