Impact Analysis and Calibration Methods of Excitation Errors for Phased Array Antennas

Phased array antennas have played a very important role in many different areas and applications. It requires precise excitation of each antenna element by various synthesis techniques to obtain desired array pattern features. However, due to reasons such as manufacturing imperfections, component aging, and temperature variation, the realistic antenna element excitation inevitably differs from their expected values in practice. This paper presents a tutorial-like review to deal with excitation errors for phased array antennas. Two kinds of analysis methods, probabilistic methods and interval arithmetic (IA) based methods, are presented to evaluate the effects of excitation errors for phased array antennas. State-of-the-art calibration methods along with various signal processing techniques are reviewed, their advantages and challenges are discussed in a comparative manner. Some other common errors and open research directions are also presented.