Antenna Arrays - Commercial; Military Airborne Applications

CAES Antenna Arrays defy the impossible. Designed with decades of knowledge of commercial and military airborne applications, we offer an extensive product line and custom design capabilities to meet all of your design needs.

CAES is the world’s leading provider of flat plate, waveguide slot arrays for weather radar functionality in commercial aircraft. For defense applications, Weather Radar, antenna arrays. For defense applications, our portfolio includes:

• Narrow and wideband AESAs featuring high-speed beam steering, low sidelobes, and high EIRP
• Multimode Flat Plate, waveguide slot arrays, with integrated beamformers, polarizers, and monopulse functionality
• Discrete aperture or microstrip-based, planar, or shaped arrays
• Interferometer Arrays for precision direction-finding
   

The information below provides more details on each of these capabilities.

Active Electronically Scanned Arrays (AESAs)

CAES AESAs enable tremendous operational flexibility at an unprecedented performance-to-price ratio.

Capabilities:

• Unique, wideband AESA technology, ideally suited for electronic warfare applications
• Blended technology approach to RF construction with extensive utilization of COTS SMT devices
• All GaN RF PowerStage, using either COTS or custom GaN devices as needed to address customer specific SWaP requirements
• Highly-integrated, multicore ICs provide high-speed, high-resolution, beam steering
• Integrated gigabit Ethernet interface for command and control 
• MOSA compatible, enabling future system upgrades and technology insertion
• Liquid and air cooling options available to suit specific applications
• High mean time between failures (MTBF) with graceful degradation

Our AESAs are based on our field-proven monolithic microwave integrated circuits (MMICs) which enable unprecedented integration of aperture-to-data signal chains, including Ka- and W-Bands. Offered as both complete solutions as well as custom MMICs for AESA design, they feature:

• Modular, scalable, system-on-chip (SOC) solution
• SoC technology includes flip-chip and bumped die configurations
• Multichannel GaN-based transmit/receive MMIC technology
• Multiple Input, Multiple Output (MIMO) technology offers extended virtual receive channels
• High speed beam steering and control with a single steering vector for the entire array

Horn Arrays

CAES designs and manufactures custom Horn Antenna Arrays for Datalink, Electronic Warfare, and Satcom applications.

Capabilities:

• Wideband, high EIRP, low sidelobe, arrays 
• Monopulse capability for DF Applications
• Multiple or switchable polarizations
• Polarizing grids provide Slant 45 polarization

Interferometer Arrays

Leveraging its antennas and RF front end electronics design expertise, CAES designs and manufactures custom interferometers for high precision, signal interception, and direction-finding missions. 

Capabilities:

• High precision, phase-based interferometry for COMINT and ELINT direction-finding, missions
• 1-D and 2-D interferometry with optimized SWaP performance  
• Support for wide range of antenna solutions including horns, spirals, and sinuous, allowing optimization of field-of-view, polarization, and sensitivity to suit customer requirements 
• Integrated RF front end including filters, limiters, gain stages, and channelizing 
• Real-time and onboard storage calibration
• Full user control via RS-422, Ethernet, or SPI

Patch Arrays

CAES designs and manufactures custom patch antenna arrays for datalink, electronic warfare, and SATCOM applications.

Capabilities:

• Low-profile, lightweight, microstrip-based designs are ideal for conformal or wraparound requirements
• Multiple polarization options including circular, dual-circular, linear, and dual-linear 
• Microstrip-based design offers robust mechanical solution for severe environments such as gun launch, missiles, munitions, and launch vehicles

Slotted Waveguide, Flat Plate, Arrays

CAES designs and manufactures custom slotted waveguide flat plate arrays for commercial weather radar, datalink, electronic warfare, SATCOM, and telemetry applications. These arrays are lightweight, mechanically robust, and utilize a highly repeatable, high yield manufacturing process, resulting best-in-class SWaP-C performance.