A high‐power and high‐efficiency low‐profile aperture converter array

Abstract

For a phased‐array antenna system, position mismatches in spacing distances between source's output and antenna arrays’ input ports are common. At present, flexible radiofrequency cables are always utilized to electrically connect those two parts, which will result in the reduced integration. To tackle this problem, a low‐profile aperture converter array (ACA) is first proposed, which is applied between a microwave source and antenna arrays. Each stripline‐structured channel of the ACA is composed of the signal lines with different routing shapes to achieve nearly the same phase shift. In this study, a high‐power and high‐efficiency 16‐channel ACA is designed, fabricated and measured at X‐band. Experimental results show that it meets the requirement of 5‐kW pulse wave input, and the power transfer efficiency of each channel is more than 93.8%. Furthermore, its profile is only 0.42 at 9 GHz, which is favorable to transforming the integration of the whole system.