A Novel Low Sidelobe Phased Array Synthesis Technique Using Uniform Transmit and Thinned Receive Array

The radar systems specify the peak sidelobe levels (SLLs) of the two-way antenna array pattern, which is the product of the patterns of the transmit and receive antenna arrays. The presence of high sidelobes near the main beam of the two-way array pattern can cause interference and ground clutter of the radar system, thereby degrading overall performance. This paper presents a novel technique for synthesizing a two-way phased array antenna pattern that utilizes a uniform transmit and a thinned receive array. Specifically, we propose a centerdominant sparse edge receive array architecture, where all elements in the central region remain continuously active, while only a few elements are activated at both edges of the array to achieve thinning. The proposed antenna array has a peak SLL of -39.36 dB, representing a 12.84 dB improvement at the cost of a 1.18 dB reduction in directivity compared to conventional arrays, where the peak SLL achieved is -26.52 dB. Furthermore, the proposed array shows an improvement of 7.36 dB and 0.22 dB in SLL and directivity, respectively, compared to the state-of-the-art solutions.