Next Generation Hardware
The progress in technology has been pushing the frontiers of what is feasible thanks to new and ingenuous solutions that had been proposed, particularly in the radar technology domain.
Via the taming of the Maxwell’s equations for radiative structures and guided propagation, from optimization or enhancement of radio frequency architecture to novel radiant/reflective elements, SONDRA is always present in this effort of proposing and implementing the next generation of radar and microwave systems.
Metasurfaces
The concept of metamaterials emerged as a way to knowingly engineer properties of artificial structures and adapt them to real-life applications. By creating spatial modulation (design at the wavelength scale) in a reflective surface, metasurface, it becomes possible to perform wavefront transformations such as anomalous reflection and transmission. Thus, electrically reconfigurable metasurfaces find their application in antennas and have been used, in particular, to improve performances of reflectarray and transmitarray antennas.
Phased antenna arrays
The radar systems were first used for the detection and distance estimation of objects. Progress in the understanding of the electromagnetic waves allowed to control their direction an intensity while keeping a high polarization purity (axial ratio) for wide frequency bandwidths. All these characteristics have to be taken into account while designing phased antenna arrays for radar applications for extracting the most of information of the targets (size, shape and electrical properties) while minimizing the influence of the clutter.
Radiofrequency electronics
The success of the radar systems depends strongly on the preservation of the purity (phase and linearity) of the emitted and received radio signals, during their amplification, filtering, modulation and demodulation, mixing, up to analog/digital conversion. All these stages besides noise and non-linearity limits need to be considered in the design of the RF front-end architecture, their elements and radiating elements.
