Recent developments and future trends in phased arrays

An update is here given of the amazing advances in phased arrays from small low cost arrays to large arrays. Now >500 A/C AESAs have been deployed with > 400,000 operational flight hours; >1.8 million T/Rs manufactured; over a million blind spot car radars manufactured; Patriot upgraded to 2012 state-of-the-art; 8 AN/TPY-2s delivered and 5 more to be built; JLENS, CJR, AN/SPY-3 and Dual Band Radar about to be deployed; DBF advancing with Australian S-band CEAFAR, which has A/D at each element, having undergone sea tests; AMDR and Space Fence have undergone their initial development phase; GaN allowing 5x power for same footprint as GaAs; 3D integrated circuit digital chips in production - Moore's Law marches on; DARPA looking at developing a low cost 94 GHz array with a cost goal of $1/element; DARPA COSMOS program taking monolithic microwave integrated circuits (MMIC) to the next level allowing mixed signal integration.