Electromechanical Co-Design and Experimental Testing of Package Layer in Structurally Embedded Phased Array Antenna

Abstract

Structurally embedded phased array antenna (SEPAA) provides a new paradigm where the structural surface of a mobile vehicle acts as an antenna. This letter presents an optimal design method for a new SEP AA which consists of a package layer, a RF layer and a power-signal process layer. Electromechanical co-design model of the package layer was formulated to obtain an optimal mechanical and electromagnetic performance of the SEP AA. Moreover, in order to efficiently solve the model, this paper also proposes a parallel Bayesian optimization (PBO), which can utilize the parallel computing of EM simulations to alleviate the computational cost. The comparison results show that the PBO achieves better optimization results with significantly less iteration numbers, and the measured results of the fabricated Ka-band prototype demonstrate that the designed SEP AA has good mechanical load-bearing and radiation performance.