Fast Synthesis of Planar, Maximally Thinned Arrays

In this paper a method for a fast synthesis of planar, maximally thinned and steerable arrays is proposed and tested on several benchmarks available in literature. The method optimizes simultaneously the weight coefficients and sensor positions of a planar array without using global optimization schemes, properly exploiting convex optimization based algorithms. The resulting arrays are able to radiate a steerable beam pattern, satisfying a prescribed power mask and avoid to constraint the fitting of any a priori assigned reference field pattern. Although such a method takes into account the general case of sparse arrays, this letter is focused on the case of thinned arrays as a special case of sparse ones, since the initial grid to thin on has only half-wavelength distances. Such a feature allows a faster synthesis than in the general case of sparse arrays.