A Divide-and-Conquer Tiling Method for the Design of Large Aperiodic Phased Arrays

Abstract

Due to the growing request from modern wireless applications of cost-affordable and high-gain scanning antenna solutions, the design of large phased arrays (PAs) with radiating elements organized into modular clusters with sub-array-only amplitude and phase control is a key topic. In this paper, an innovative irregular tiling method is proposed where, according to a divide-and-conquer strategy, the antenna aperture is subdivided into sub-areas that are locally domino-tiled by jointly fulfilling the full-coverage condition on the remaining untiled part of the PA support. Selected representative results, including comparisons with competitive state-of-the-art synthesis methods, are reported to prove the effectiveness and the computational efficiency of the proposed tiling approach. Use-cases of current relevance for low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite communications are discussed, as well, to provide the antenna designers useful practical guidelines for handling large PAs.