IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation [announcement of a special section]

“Innovative Phased Array Antennas based on Non-regular Lattices and Overlapped Subarrays” There is a growing demand for large aperture antennas exhibiting increased capabilities (in terms of flexibility, reconfigurability, frequency bandwidth, and field of view) and reduced cost and complexity. Organizing a large array into overlapped subarrays or adopting a non-regular lattice represent two effective strategies to achieve high performance while minimizing the number of controls for a limited field of view or wide band array. Arrays using non-regular lattices are a valid alternative to periodic arrays because they are able to generate an equivalent tapering by adjusting the element positions They also allow reducing the number of elements, and increasing the DC to RF overall efficiency of the antenna. Dividing a large array into overlapped sub-arrays (i.e. with a radiating antenna element contributing to more than one sub-array) permits increasing the extension of a sub-array, with improved angular filtering performance, while keeping the same or an increased inter-subarray distance. Because the number of subarrays is reduced compared to the total number of elements populating the whole array, a comparable reduction in the number of control elements is achieved and the overall antenna complexity may be reduced with respect to a conventional design.