A Lightweight and Scalable Half-brick and Half-tile Design for X-band Digital T/R Sub-array

In order to meet the small size and lightweight requirements of unmanned aircraft/ship radar equipment, this paper proposed a lightweight and scalable half-brick and half-tile design of X-band digital transceiver sub-array structure. In the proposed design, the RF T/R components are arranged in brick structure, planar antenna, frequency conversion module, power board and digital T/R board are arranged in tile structure, and they are vertically stacked through miniature connectors to achieve interconnection. The combination of brick and tile structure not only ensures good heat dissipation performance of RF T/R components, but also omits cables and reduces the overall size of the sub-array. The sub-array contains 64 RF channels, with a single channel transmitting power greater than 39.5 dBm and NF less than 5 dB. Specially, its external dimension is 106 mm × 106 mm × 130 mm and its weight is 2.1 kg, which is smaller and lighter than the conventional sub-array with the same number of channels. Due to the compact profile and small weight of the sub-array by the proposed design, the active phased-array formed by sub-arrays can be conformal with the architecture of the unmanned platform, effectively reducing the size and weight of the detection equipment.