The Impact of Group Delay Dispersion on Radar Imaging with Multiresonant Antennas

Abstract

Radar sensing has become very popular over the last two decades, and research has focused on high-bandwidth and high-resolution systems. Due to the steadily increasing center frequency of front-end circuits, on-chip antennas are the preferred choice over PCB antennas and horn antennas when frequencies get close to THz. However, conventional on-chip antennas are severely limited in bandwidth, leading to increased use of wideband and multiresonant on-chip antennas. Besides a more complex design process of multiresonant antennas, they have the disadvantage of a nonconstant dispersive group delay (GD). This reduces the resolution of sensing systems, such as the range resolution and angular resolution of a radar system. In this work, we show how GD affects the imaging properties of a radar system. The measured S-parameter data from a 240-GHz multiresonant antenna are used to generate synthetic intermediate frequency (IF) signals of a rectangular array. Subsequently, simulated 3-D radar images are generated using the backprojection algorithm. These images are compared with those of a nondispersive imaging system. Finally, two compensation methods using a phase correction method and an all-pass filter are explained, and their performance is compared.