An active electronic Ka-band antenna beam-forming network based on injection-locked local oscillators

A novel implementation of a modular beam-forming network is presented that achieves the required large inter-channel phase shift by utilizing the phase shift from an injection locked oscillator. The network includes a mixer for down-conversion of the input signal from the 35-GHz to the 5-GHz range. The highly compact prototype realization on RT/Duroid with epsilon(r) = 10.2 serves as proof of concept for LTCC implementation at a future point. The network is designed for receive mode but can also accommodate the transmit mode by changing the direction of the buffer amplifiers. The number of channels can be expended due to the modular design.