Modular Phased Array Antennas for Modern Applications

The trend towards highly modular phased arrays with simplified beam forming networks is being driven by modern communication and sensing antenna system applications. In the last years, this has led to an increased focus on unconventional phased array architectures, proposing array thinning, sparsening, and clustering to reduce the complexity and costs of conventional fully-populated arrays. The purpose of this work is provide an overview of recent contributions in this field and to discuss methodological and architectural advances of modular phased arrays for modern radar, sensing, and satellite/terrestrial communication applications. Additionally, the design of a modular tiled phased array addressing satcom on-the-move requirements is illustrated as an instance of the reviewed state-of-the-art design techniques.