A Novel Analytic Beam Steering Approach For Clustered Phased Array Architectures

The synthesis of the sub-array phases for multi-beams scanning applications is here addressed. A hybrid analog/digital architecture is considered in which analog element excitations are used to generate a reference beam, while a digital sub-arrayed beam-forming network (BFN) is used for steering a secondary beam within a limited scan cone. The digital phases are obtained through an innovative analytic method, jointly optimized with the sub-arrays configuration. A simple numerical assessment has been reported to validate the proposed approach.