A beamforming method enabling easy packaging of scalable architecture phased arrays

Today's large phased arrays-especially the ones used in radars-are most of the time based on scalable architectures which have the so called tile, tray or brick type sub-array structures as their building blocks. A common challenge regarding these types of arrays is the integration of different sub-array blocks with each other. The main reason behind this, is the difficulty in maintaining the uniformity of the array at the sub-array boundaries despite the mechanical interfaces. In this work, a method is proposed which enables the array designer to use non-uniformities at the sub-array boundaries without any impact on the array performance. The technique is based on disabling array elements at the boundaries given that some special element spacing conditions are satisfied creating a rank deficiency in the visible portion of the beam space of the array.