Phase-shifter-less beam scanning in a planar array of antennas with nonlinear front-end and spatial LO power distribution

In this work, the authors proposed and modeled a phase shifter-less phased array receiver. In the front-end of the array, the harmonic mixing of the spatially distributed local oscillator (LO) signal with the incident RF signal produces the required intermediate frequency (IF) signal. For beamsteering, only the LO feed antenna is to be scanned mechanically. This reduces the complexity and thus the cost of the phased array, which can be of practical use in certain applications. The presented numerical results for some typical values of the involving parameters show that the proposed array can maintain an almost constant antenna gain within a wide scan range for a RF received power in the range of -80 dBm to -20 dBm.