Design of Aperiodic Subarrayed Phased Arrays With Structural Repetitiveness

To eliminate the grating lobes of subarrayed phased arrays, the state-of-the-art methods mainly use subarrays of various shapes to make up an irregular subarray tiling configuration (irRSTC), so as to break the periodicity of the subarray tiling configuration. However, it leads to high design complexity due to the lack of structural repetitiveness. Different from the previous idea, the periodicity of the subarray tiling configuration is broken by introducing asymmetrical feeding phase into subarrays in this article. Specifically, a regular subarray tiling configuration (RSTC) is proposed, and it is obtained by replication and flipping of a regular subarray with asymmetrical feeding phase. In this way, the structural repetitiveness is achieved, while the periodicity of the RSTC is broken. Furthermore, to enhance the beam scanning ability, the aperiodicity of the RSTC is maximized by minimizing the predictability of the RSTC, based on the anticorrelation relationship between the aperiodicity and the predictability. Numerical results show that compared with the irRSTC, the proposed RSTC can expand the beam scanning range by 10° and improve the directivity of larger angle scanning by 2.9 dB only at an expense of 1.9 dB reduction at the boresight. Besides, the design complexity of the proposed RSTC is reduced to 1/64 of that of the irRSTC for a 16
$\times16$
array.