Wide-Scan and Wideband Antenna Array Design for Phased Array applications in X-band

This paper proposes a wide-scan and wide band antenna array that is designed and optimized for phased array applications. A U-slot microstrip patch antenna (UMPA) is designed and extended to 8x8 and 11×11 element arrays where a comparative study of their performance is analysed. In order to simulate the UMPA, a Taconic substrate of dielectric constant 2.2 and thickness 2.36mm was chosen. For the designed UMPA, the substrate thickness is selected based on the bandwidth requirement and the frequency of interest is the X-band. The arrays are designed using Finite Array Domain Decomposition Method (FADDM) and careful optimisations are carried out using an EM solver HFSS to obtain a return loss better than -20dB at all the ports while having a bandwidth of 2GHz. The designed antenna array has a scanning performance of ±45° and ±60° which can be extensively utilized in phased array applications.