Active phased array design for high clutter improvement factor

One way to improve a radar's ability to detect moving targets against high clutter is to use an active phased array, which has the potential for extremely high clutter improvement factor (CIF) because of its distributed architecture. The pulse-to-pulse amplitude and phase instabilities of the T/R modules tend to be randomized between modules and thus, combine in a noise-like fashion, while the target returns add coherently. We discuss in detail how an active phased array antenna can be designed to achieve high CIF by examining the benefits of the distributed architecture, the placement of components in the beamformer and the layout of the power distribution network.