A 1024-Element Ku-Band SATCOM Phased-Array Transmitter With 45-dBW Single-Polarization EIRP

This article presents a 1024-element Ku-band phased-array transmitter for mobile satellite communications. The array is based on eight-channel transmit (TX) SiGe beamformer chips. Dual-polarized stacked-patch antennas enable the array to synthesize linear, rotated-linear, and left- and right-hand circular polarization. The array consists of four quadrants of 256-element subarrays, each of which has 64 beamformer chips and a driver chip assembled on a printed circuit board (PCB). The array achieves an effective isotropic radiated power (EIRP) of 75 dBm per polarization (78-dBm circular polarization) and scans to ±75° in all planes. This is achieved using an antenna spacing of $\lambda $ /2 at 14.4 GHz in an equilateral triangular grid. The array also results in 30-dB cross-polarization rejection up to 60° scan angles. Measured error vector magnitude (EVM) for 50-, 100-, 200-, and 500-MBd QPSK and 8 phase-shift keying (8PSK) waveforms results in at most 1.5%rms and 2.5%rms at $P_{1\textrm {dB}}$ and $P_{\mathrm{ sat}}$ , respectively, at 14 GHz over all scan angles. Also, the adjacent channel power ratio (ACPR) was measured as −32 dB for 200- and 500-MBd QPSK and 8 phase-shift keying (8PSK) waveforms at $P_{1\textrm {dB}}$ at 14 GHz. To the authors’ knowledge, this work presents a state-of-the-art planar phased-array system with high EIRP for Ku-band satellite communication (SATCOM) mobile transmitter terminals.