Coupling reduction in an active highly integrated Tx phased array antenna with scanning capability

Abstract

This paper presents a novel method for analyzing and reducing the total coupled power in the Active Highly Integrated Phased Array Antennas (AIPAA), incorporating both the nonlinear impacts of the power amplifier (PA) transfer functions and the normalized scattering matrix. The proposed method introduces a new degree of freedom to reduce the coupling level utilizing two key factors: (i) the balance between the PAs’ transfer function gain and the coupled power difference to the PAs’ gate and drain/antenna ports, and (ii) the out-of-phase sum based on PAs’ transfer function phase response. The proposed method is theoretically demonstrated by accounting for all tones and also is subsequently simplified for the main tone. The method is practically validated by applying the method to a 1 × 5 AIPAA structure to reduce the total coupled power at its drain/antenna port. The results demonstrate a coupling reduction of −5 dB as an average with a maximum reduction of −20 dB, over a scan coverage of ±30∘ and 10% fractional bandwidth at 22 GHz for the center cell.