Biologically-inspired, electrically small antenna arrays

First, the motivation behind adding a passive external coupling network after antenna arrays is discussed, the concept of biomimetic antenna arrays (BMAAs) introduced and some of the previous work done in this area have been reviewed. Next, a BMAA which achieves an angular resolution of roughly 15 times its regular counterpart is introduced and fully characterized. The introduced BMAA employs transformers which considerably degrade its performance, namely its output power. To cicumvent this shortcoming a new architecture of a BMAA that does not employ transformers and therefore yields a higher output power for the same angular resolution has been subsequently presented. Moreover, a detailed noise analysis of this BMAA is carried out and the output noise of the new architecture is compared with the output noise of the original design. The modified twoelement BMAA architecture is then extended to multiple elements. A novel nonlinear optimization process is introduced that maximizes the total power captured by the BMAA for a given angular resolution and the concept illustrated for a three-element antenna array. Next an optimum two-element BMAA which achieves the maximum possible angular resolution while obtaining the same output power level of a regular antenna array with the same elements and spacing is introduced. A novel two-element superdirective array based on this optimum BMAA has been also discussed. The passive BMAAs discussed in this thesis have a relatively narrow bandwidth. To extend the bandwidth of BMAAs, non- Foster networks have been employed in their external coupling networks and it has been demonstrated that they can increase their bandwidth by a factor of roughly 33. Finally, the BMAA concept has been extended to nano-antenna arrays and a concept for designing sub-wavelength angle-sensing detectors at optical wavelengths has been introduced.