A Millimeter-Wave Wide Band, Wide Scanning Phased Array-Fed Reflector Architecture

Phased Array Fed Reflectors (PAFRs) are desirable in RF antenna systems because of their high gain, however they require mechanical gimballing to compensate for the limited electronic scan volume that hinders swath. State of the art Electronically Scanned Array (ESA) solutions can address demanding link performance, capacity, and data rates using multiple agile analog beams, but they do so at a premium size, weight, power, and cost (SWaP-C). Especially for wide field of view (FOV) millimeter Wave (mmW) frequencies which require larger sized ESAs to close the links. This paper presents an innovative phased array architecture leveraging a ring-focused reflector that improves the scan performance of conventional PAFRs, denoted Wide Angle ESA Fed Reflector (WAEFR). This type of reflector architecture provides wide band performance with an electronic scan volume increase of up to 20x over traditional PAFRs and can reduce the size of an active ESA by over 40%.