Never ending saga of phased array breakthroughs

3, 4, 6 face "Aegis" systems developed by China, Japan, Australia, Netherlands, USA. Israel and Australia "Aegis" AESAs have an A/D at every element, a major breakthrough. GaN advancing rapidly. Will be helped by use for PCs, notebooks, cell phones, servers. Extreme MMIC: 4 X-band T/Rs on 1 SiGe chip for DARPA ISIS program; goal <;$10/TR. Raytheon funding development of low cost flat panel Xband array using COTS type PCB. MA-COM/Lincoln-Lab. development of low cost Sband flat panel array using PCB, overlapped subarrays and a T/R switch instead of a circulator. Purdue Un. developing S-band low cost Digital Array Radar; GaN PA and A/D at every element. Revolutionary 3-D Micromachining: integrated circuitry for microwave components, like 16 element Ka-band array with Butler beamformer on 13 × 2 cm
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chip. Ultra low cost 77 GHz radar on 72 mm
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chip together with >8 bits 1 GS/s A/D and 16 element array. Valeo-Raytheon 24 GHz phased array now available for blind spot detection in cars for just $100's. Lincoln Lab using 2 W chip increases spurious free dynamic range of receiver plus A/D by 20 dB JPL's SweepSAR provides wide swath SAR from space with 1/6 th power required by ScanSAR. Metamaterials: 1. Can now focus 6X beyond diffraction limit at 0.38 μm Moore's Law marches on. 2. Used in cell phones to obtain antennas 5X smaller and have 700 MHz-2.7 GHz bandwidth. 3. Provide isolation between closely spaced antennas and antenna elements.