Rotman Lens Design and Simulation in Software

The US Army Research Laboratory provided financial assistance for a project, to generate software for designing Rotman Lenses. The project has been funded, as part of an initiative, to develop cost-effective electronic scanning arrays for communications systems operating from C band up to Ka band. The broadband performance of Rotman Lenses meet a key need of allowing the same antenna system to serve multiple functions. The project focused on microstrip and stripline designs, due to their relative simplicity of construction as compared with precisely-machined waveguides. The software, developed under the project is used to analyze a microstrip Rotman Lens for the Ka band. Rotman Lens is a parallel device that is used to feed an antenna array. It has a specific shape and appropriate length transmission lines, to produce a wavefront across the output that is phased by the time delay in the signal transmission.