A Method for Forming Distributed Beams in Time-Modulated Planar Arrays

The sidebands that originate in time-modulated arrays can be used for numerous applications including multipath signal separation and directional power transfer. In this paper, a method of simultaneously producing a series of beams that are steered toward unique 2-D directions is presented by developing the theory of time-modulated linear arrays to time-modulated planar arrays. A planar array is modeled as two linear arrays on orthogonal axes, and the binomial and Dolph-Chebyshev time-weighting distributions are applied to a 5×5 element array. The output of the array is shown in both the time and frequency domains.