Randomly tiled rectangular sub-arrays for side lobe and grating lobe reduction in mm-Wave limited scanning phased array

In 5G communication system a high gain steerable phased array is desired. In this paper, a novel mm-Wave 256 element phased array system based on 8 element sub-arrays is presented. The sub-arrays are randomly tiled so the periodicity in the array is disrupted and significantly reduce the side lobe level (SLL). Four different rectangular sub-arrays: 1×8, 8×1, 2×4 and 4×2 are used to completely fill the phased array aperture. The steering range is ±15° in both Azimuth and Elevation planes achieving <; -10dBc grating lobe/SLL and better than 60% aperture efficiency. This technique greatly reduces the required array control circuits in a large-scale array. It can be a great candidate for multi-Giga-bit/s (Gbps) 5G communications and it can be realized with multilayer technologies such as low temperature co-fired ceramic (LTCC).