A new class of Planar Ultrawideband Modular Antenna (PUMA) arrays, termed PUMAv3, is introduced to offer improved performance and further meet demand needs for multifunctional systems. PUMAv3 extends the frequency scalability of PUMA arrays to mm-waves (approximately 50 GHz) and improves bandwidth by 50\% without the use of a matching network or external baluns. The major enabling technical innovation is the advent of a new common-mode mitigation mechanism that relies upon capacitively-loaded shorting vias to push broadside catastrophic resonances below the operating band without inhibiting low-end bandwidth performance. Ridged waveguide models are employed to explain the operational principles and accurately predict the location of the common-mode frequency within the new array topology. Additionally, the superstrate loading scheme is split into two exclusive layers to enhance broadside and wide angle impedance levels while maintaining the highest frequency at 97% of the grating lobe frequency and reducing the overall array profile by up to 30%. The PUMAv3 also retains the attractive practical advantages inherent to the PUMA array family: aperture modularity, direct 50-ohm feeding, and low-cost planar multilayer PCB fabrication. Infinite array full-wave simulations of a dual-polarized PUMAv3 satisfying manufacture guidelines suggest 10.6-47.6 GHz (4.5:1) operation with strong VSWR levels out to 45 degrees, high port isolation and low cross-polarization.

The Electronically Steered Phased Array is one of the most versatile antennas used in radars applications. Some of the advantages of electronic steering are faster scan, no moving parts and higher reliability. However, the cost of phased arrays has always been prohibitive - in the order of $1M per square meter. The cost of a phased array is largely impacted by the cost of the high frequency electronics at each element and the cost of packaging. Advances in IC integration will allow incorporating multiple elements such as low noise amplifier, power amplifier, phase shifters and up/down-conversion into one or two ICs. Even though the cost for large quantities of ICs (both Silicon and GaAs) has lowered, the high cost of IC packaging and the array backplane still make the use of phase arrays for radar applications costly. The focus of this research is on techniques that reduce the packaging and the backplane cost of large electronically steered arrays. These techniques are based on simplified signal distributions schemes, reduction of layers in the backplane and use of inexpensive materials. Two architectures designed based on these techniques, as well as a novel BGA active antenna package for dual polarized phased arrays are presented. The first architecture, called the series fed row-column architecture, focuses on the reduction of phase shifters and control signals used in the backplane of the array. The second architecture, called the parallel plate feed architecture, is based on a simplified scheme for distribution of the local oscillator signal. A prototype making use of each one of these architectures is presented. Analysis of advantages and disadvantages of each of these architectures is described. The necessity of cost reduction is a factor that can possibly impact the polarization performance of the antenna. This factor is a motivation to study and develop calibration techniques that reduce the cross-polarization of electronically steered phased arrays. Advances on Interleaving Sparse Arrays, a beam forming technique for polarization improvement/correction in phased arrays, are also presented.

Ultrawideband (UWB) phased antenna arrays are critical to the success of future multi-functional communication, sensing, and countermeasure systems, which will utilize a few UWB phased arrays in place of multiple antennas on a platform. The success of this new systems approach relies in part on the ability to manufacture and assemble low-cost UWB phased arrays with excellent radiation characteristics.This dissertation presents the theory and design of a new class of UWB arrays that is based on unbalanced fed tightly-coupled horizontal dipoles over a ground plane. Practical implementation of this concept leads to two inexpensive wideband array topologies, the Banyan Tree Antenna (BTA) Array, and the Planar Ultrawideband Modular Antenna (PUMA) Array. The key challenge in designing unbalanced-fed tightly-coupled dipole arrays lies in the control of a common mode resonance that destroys UWB performance. This work introduces a novel feeding strategy that eliminates this resonance and results in wideband, wide-angle radiation. More importantly, the new feeding scheme is simple and intuitive, and can be implemented at low-cost in both vertically and planarly-integrated phased array architectures. Another desirable byproduct of this topology is the electrical and mechanical modularity of the aperture, which enables easy manufacturability and assembly. A theoretical framework is presented for the new phased array topologies, which is then applied to the design of innite BTA and PUMA arrays that achieve 4:1 and 5:1 bandwidths,respectively. A practical application of this technology is demonstrated through the full design, fabrication, and measurement of a 7.25-21GHz 16x16 dual-pol PUMA array prototype for SATCOM applications.

In this work, the formulation and the implementation of innovative methodological paradigms for the design of unconventional array architectures for future generation communication systems has been addressed. By exploiting the potentialities of the codesign strategy for elementary radiators in an irregularly clustered array architectures and by introducing an innovative capacity-driven design paradigm, the proposed methodologies allow to effectively design unconventional array architectures with optimal trade-offs in terms of performance and complexity/costs. The codesign synthesis strategy is proposed to solve the arising massive multi-objective design problem aimed at fitting the multiple objectives and requirements on the "free-space" performance of the array architecture. Afterward, the capacity-driven design paradigm is formulated and implemented for the design of MIMO array architectures to maximize the quality of the communication system in first place instead of considering "free-space" figures-of-merit. A set of numerical results has been provided (i) to validate the proposed paradigms in real-application scenarios and (ii) to provide insights on the effectiveness, the limitations and the potentialities of proposed design methodologies.

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Semantic Web and Linked Open Data provide a potential platform for interoperability of scientific data, offering a flexible model for providing machine-readable and queryable metadata. However, RDF and SPARQL gained limited adoption within the scientific community, mainly due to the lack of support for managing massive numeric data, along with certain other important features – such as extensibility with user-defined functions, query modularity, and integration with existing environments and workflows. We present the design, implementation and evaluation of Scientific SPARQL – a language for querying data and metadata combined, represented using the RDF graph model extended with numeric multidimensional arrays as node values – RDF with Arrays. The techniques used to store RDF with Arrays in a scalable way and process Scientific SPARQL queries and updates are implemented in our prototype software – Scientific SPARQL Database Manager, SSDM, and its integrations with data storage systems and computational frameworks. This includes scalable storage solutions for numeric multidimensional arrays and an efficient implementation of array operations. The arrays can be physically stored in a variety of external storage systems, including files, relational databases, and specialized array data stores, using our Array Storage Extensibility Interface. Whenever possible SSDM accumulates array operations and accesses array contents in a lazy fashion. In scientific applications numeric computations are often used for filtering or post-processing the retrieved data, which can be expressed in a functional way. Scientific SPARQL allows expressing common query sub-tasks with functions defined as parameterized queries. This becomes especially useful along with functional language abstractions such as lexical closures and second-order functions, e.g. array mappers. Existing computational libraries can be interfaced and invoked from Scientific SPARQL queries as foreign functions. Cost estimates and alternative evaluation directions may be specified, aiding the construction of better execution plans. Costly array processing, e.g. filtering and aggregation, is thus preformed on the server, saving the amount of communication. Furthermore, common supported operations are delegated to the array storage back-ends, according to their capabilities. Both expressivity and performance of Scientific SPARQL are evaluated on a real-world example, and further performance tests are run using our mini-benchmark for array queries.

ITC/USA 2010 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-Sixth Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 25-28, 2010 / Town and Country Resort & Convention Center, San Diego, California / Traditional angle of arrival algorithms operate with uniform receiver arrays. Non-uniform arrays typically introduce significant elevation of computation complexity. This paper utilizes the double-integration method for the accurate estimation of the angle of arrival with non-uniform receiver arrays, while maintaining high computation efficiency. Because of the simplicity, the double-integration method is not significantly affected by the increase of the number of receivers or the non-uniform configuration. This approach allows us to perform high-speed high-accuracy estimation of the two-dimensional bearing angle without the constraints of structured receiver arrays, which is important to the realization of real-time tracking of mobile acoustic sources.

This thesis presents instrumentation with which to measure the abundance of neutral hydrogen gas in the Universe. Measuring where the Universe’s hydrogen is, and tracing how its distribution evolves with time, holds the key to understanding how galaxies evolve, the nature of dark energy, and how the first cosmic structures formed. In particular, this thesis looks at instrumentation for 21-cm intensity mapping telescopes. In 21-cm intensity mapping, the collective emission of many galaxies is measured, without individual detections. This technique promises to allow detection of the baryonic acoustic oscillation peaks in the power spectrum of the Universe’s matter distribution. Such a detection would increase constraints on cosmological parameters. There are two main approaches to designing a 21-cm intensity mapping instruments: using a filled aperture instrument such as a single-dish telescope, or using a sparse aperture instrument such as an interferometric array of dipoles. This thesis investigates analogue components for a sparse aperture instrument operating at 1.0-1.5 GHz. As part of this work, a 16-element sparse aperture array was designed and constructed. To test the array’s performance, field testing was conducted; the results of which are presented here. In addition to this, I have designed a new digital spectrometer for redshifted hydrogen line science, named HISPEC. A copy of this spectrometer has been installed on the Parkes 64 m telescope, as a digital signal processor for the 21-cm multibeam receiver. HISPEC has increased instantaneous bandwidth, higher interchannel isolation, and improved quantization efficiency as compared to the existing backend, MBCORR. The HISPEC equipped multibeam receiver is an ideal instrument for 21-cm intensity mapping at redshifts z<0.2.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 17-20, 1994 / Town & Country Hotel and Conference Center, San Diego, California / In order to meet the high-speed and high-density recording requirements for today's development and testing environments, we are seeking to merge the cutting edge technologies of tiny, high-performance disk drives and field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) to build a high-speed compact disk recorder (CHSDR). Specifically, we designed, built, and tested a multi-drive controller that handles the interleaving of data to eight inexpensive IDE drives. These drives and controller comprise a "cell" capable of transferring data at 2.45 MB/sec (4 to 5 times the rate of a single drive). Furthermore, these "cells" can be run in parallel (with a single controller interleaving data between the cells). This "tree" effect multiplies the data rate by the number of cells employed. For example, 8 cells (of 8 drives each) can reach nearly 20 MB/second (sustained) and can be built for less than $30,000. The drives we used are the size of match boxes (the Hewlett Packard KittyHawk). These tiny drives hold 42 megabytes each and can withstand 150 Gs while operating. The cell controller is a Xilinx 4005 FPGA. Furthermore, we've designed a 120 MB/sec RAM FIFO to buffer data entering the system (to account for unavoidable drive seek latencies). In short, the compact high-speed disk array is a small, relatively low cost recording solution for anyone requiring high data speed but modest data volume. Missile shots, nuclear tests, and other short-term experiments are good examples of such requirements.