Irregular Subarray with Gathered Elements for Sidelobe Suppression

Subarray technique is an effective approach for reducing the cost of a phased array system. Although integrating multiple elements into a subarray can reduce the number of radio frequency (RF) chains and system complexity, how to avoid grating lobes when performing beam-scanning remains a challenging research topic. This paper evaluates the scanning performance of three different types of polyomino-shaped irregular subarray configurations: domino-shaped, skew-tetromino-shaped & L-tetromino-shaped, and L-octomino-shaped subarray configurations, on both 8×8 and 16×16 arrays. By combining the Algorithm X technique to precisely tile polyomino-shaped subarrays and the Genetic Algorithm (GA) to find the optimal configuration, we are able to evaluate the maximum sidelobe levels (SLLs) at different scanning angles from numerical simulations.