Design of Regular Subarray Tiling with Maximum Aperiodicity and Structural Repetitiveness

In the state-of-the-art literatures, irregular subarray tiling configurations (irRSTCs) without periodicity are mainly adopted to eliminate grating lobes. However, it leads to high design complexity due to the lack of structural repetitiveness. Different from the traditional idea, a regular subarray tiling configuration (RSTC) is proposed in this paper, which 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. To enhance the beam scanning ability, the aperiodicity of the RSTC is maximized with a predictability minimization model. Numerical results show that compared with the irRSTC, the proposed RSTC expands the beam scanning range by 10° and improves the directivity of larger angle scanning by 2.9 dB only at an expense of 1.9 dB reduction at the boresight. Moreover, the design complexity is reduced to 1/64 of the original one for a $16\times 16$ array.