Evaluation of a Novel Commercial Beamforming Integrated Circuit for a Ka-band AESA Radar Application

Accurate beam pointing is an important requirement in wideband active electronically scanned array (AESA) radar systems. This paper evaluates the beam steering performance of a novel commercially released beamforming integrated circuit (BFIC) for an AESA extension of the PAMIR-Ka (Phased Array Multifunctional Imaging Radar Ka-band) system developed at Fraunhofer Institue for High Frequency Physics and Radar Techniques (FHR). A lab demonstrator is designed based on the Otava OTBF103 BFIC evaluation board and linear phased array antennas. Measurements of the lab demonstrator revealed that the beam squint effect dominates across the 8GHz bandwidth of the PAMIR-Ka system. Maximum measured beam pointing deviations were below ±5° for the transmitter and the receiver at scan angles of ±30°. Compensation of the beam squint was analyzed by simulations of the BFIC with simply modeled true-time delays, resulting in beam pointing deviations of below ±1°.