Latest Trends in Active Electronically Scanned Antennas (AESAs)

While AESAs have been around for decades, recent advances in enabling components such as solid-state efficient amplifiers, low C-SWAP RF electronics, and novel packaging/architectures, have greatly increased the applications where previously AESAs were thought to be too expensive. In this talk, we will review AESA architectures, identifying the key cost and SWAP drivers, along with the latest technologies to address these issues. We will also discuss some of the latest breakthroughs in metamaterial electronically scanned antennas (ESAs) that do not require separate RF channels or phase shifters/time delay units (TDUs). Finally, example applications leveraging this new generation of AESAs/ESAs will be discussed.

Presenter Bio:

Joseph R. Guerci has over 30 years of experience in advanced technology research and development in government, industrial, and academic settings including the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) as Director of the Special Projects Office (SPO) where he led the inception, research, development, execution, and ultimately transition of next generation multidisciplinary defense technologies. In 2007, he received the IEEE Warren D. White Award for radar adaptive processing and is a Fellow of the IEEE for contributions to advanced radar theory and embodiment in real-world systems.