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Is it really "heating" used for beam scanning in Echodyne's radar?

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Georgy.Moshkin

Georgy.Moshkin

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The metamaterial used in the radar system exists in the form of an antenna that actually changes its physical shape to steer the radar beam that it emits—a necessity for tracking moving objects. The change comes about by heating different parts of the antenna, which is made of multiple layers of copper wiring laid down on a circuit board in a very precise way. Testing has shown the radar system capable of spotting small aircraft as far away as 1.8 miles within a 120-degree field of view.
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Is it really heating or just a misinterpretation?

reference:

https://techxplore.com/news/2016-11-echodyne-metamaterials-drone-sized-radar.html
 

"...Echodyne, a Seattle-area startup backed by investors that include Bill Gates and Paul Allen, announced that it was working on a new type of radar about the size of a cellphone with performance that’s much more like the fancy phased-array radars that the military uses while costing a tenth as much or less..."

Always I had doubts in getting good REAL performances of metamaterial antennas, but these guys looks they found one good milking cow...or more :)
 

radar array is made of multiple layers of carefully patterned copper wiring, and beam control results from heating specific areas of the wiring...
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Searched for "heater phase shifter" and found some papers, for example: https://orbit.dtu.dk/files/4359773/Pu.pdf
The tuning operations of our devices are performed by electrical current through integrated heaters, instead of optical power adopted in [8]. This would be a much more practical implementation of such a phase shifter in real applications
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Interesting if something similar could be done on a substrate with large Er(t) dependency. Some current may be applied to thin high impedance lines and provide some phase shift.
 

It looks like a multi element phased array, where the elements are spaced out electrically with different time delays. As you sweep the frequency, each time delay imparts a different phase shift, so you can scan the antenna from left to right.

It is a very old concept, radars in the 1950's used this, albeit with metal waveguides providing the time delay elements.
 

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