Minimizing the Noise Penalty Due to Mutual Coupling for a Receiving Array

Abstract

For phased array receivers, mutual coupling leads to beam-dependent active impedances which must be taken into account when matching the array ports to front end amplifiers for optimal noise performance. We study the noise penalty for several noise matching conditions and develop a matching condition that minimizes the average beam equivalent receiver noise temperature over multiple beams. For non-beamforming applications such as multiple input multiple output communications, we show that noise performance for coupled arrays can be quantified using the spectrum of an equivalent receiver noise temperature correlation matrix.