Innovative antenna architectures exploiting metamaterials for new generation radars

The synthesis of new generation radars by exploiting the Material-by-Design (MbD) paradigm is addressed. The electromagnetic properties of the media employed in the engineered device are considered as an additional degree-of-freedom (DoF) of the synthesis problem in order to fulfill conflicting user-defined constraints on the radiation characteristics of the antenna systems. The potentialities of such an innovative approach are shown through an illustrative example concerned with the miniaturization of a horn antenna through a transformation electromagnetics (TE) formulation.