Sparse MIMO Array for Improved 3D mm- Wave Imaging Radar

For imaging radar, higher angular resolution is essential, yet it requires a larger number of antenna elements in enlarged regular arrays. By using antenna-array sparsity, improved imaging performance can be achieved without the increase of antenna elements and the corresponding cost. A two-step synthesis procedure is developed and validated with a model of a 3D MIMO mm-wave imaging radar. Through simulations, it is shown that with a sparse transmit and receive array, an improvement in beam-width and side-lobe levels in the virtual array patterns for MIMO radars can be achieved. The model is confirmed by an experiment using the Walabot-60GHz radar from Vayyar.