A Wideband Tightly Coupled Wide-angle Impedance Matching Layer

Abstract

This paper proposed a wide-angle impedance matching (WAIM) layer for wideband phased array antennas. The proposed WAIM is based on the tightly coupled concept which introduces an additional capacitance between unit cells and provides a wide operating bandwidth. To study the scanning ability of the array, a 32 by infinite and an infinite by 32 linear arrays are analyzed. Viewing from the simulated results, by adding the proposed WAIM over a phased array antenna, the common bandwidth is improved to around 64.6% (from 5.37 to 10.5 GHz) with the scanning ability of ±60° in E-, H- and D-plane. Besides, the WAIM has the advantage of low profile and light weight properties.