A Self-Replicating Single-Shape Tiling Technique for the Design of Highly Modular Planar Phased Arrays -- The Case of L-Shaped Rep-Tiles

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel self-replicating tiling method using rep-tiles for designing highly modular planar phased arrays, optimizing complexity and performance for large apertures.

Contribution

It presents a deterministic optimization approach for rep-tile array layouts, specifically applying L-shaped tromino tiles to improve modularity and efficiency in phased array design.

Findings

Effective tiling of large apertures demonstrated

Optimized array configurations match user requirements

Validation with ideal and real antenna models

Abstract

The design of irregular planar phased arrays (PAs) characterized by a highly-modular architecture is addressed. By exploiting the property of self-replicating tile shapes, also known as rep-tiles, the arising array layouts consist of tiles having different sizes, but equal shape, all being generated by assembling a finite number of smaller and congruent copies of a single elementary building-block. Towards this end, a deterministic optimization strategy is used so that the arising rep-tile arrangement of the planar PA is an optimal trade-off between complexity, costs, and fitting of user-defined requirements on the radiated power pattern, while guaranteeing the complete overlay of the array aperture. As a representative instance, such a synthesis method is applied to tile rectangular apertures with L-shaped tromino tiles. A set of representative results, concerned with ideal and real antenna models, as well, is reported for validation purposes, but also to point out the possibility/effectiveness of the proposed approach, unlike state-of-the-art tiling techniques, to reliably handle large-size array apertures.