Design of interleaved ultra-wideband polyfractal arrays

New remote sensing applications and techniques have made the development of robust and versatile phased array antenna designs increasingly important. However, current phased array antenna technology is primarily limited to narrowband operation with a single main-beam in the radiation pattern, electronically steerable only within a limited scanning volume. Recently a new design methodology has been developed that utilizes nature-inspired design techniques to optimize array layouts that incorporate both ordered and periodic properties in their geometries. These arrays, called polyfractal arrays, are capable of substantially lower sidelobe levels over ultra-wide bandwidths [1-3].