A novel deterministic synthesis technique for non-uniformly spaced linear antenna arrays

A novel analytical approach to the synthesis of linear sparse arrays with non-uniform amplitude excitation is presented and thoroughly discussed. The proposed antenna placement technique, based on the concept of auxiliary array factor, is aimed to the deterministic determination of the optimal array element density and excitation tapering distributions useful to mimic a desired radiation pattern mask. In particular, the developed method does not require any iterative or stochastic optimization procedure, resulting in a dramatic reduction of the design times. A selected example is included in order to assess the effectiveness and the versatility of the proposed approach.