A Novel Half-Apertured Multiplicative Array for Antenna Pattern Synthesis

Pattern synthesis is pivotal for designing antenna arrays to achieve expected radiation patterns, crucial in modern communication systems and sensing. Extremely large scale antenna arrays, which have gained significant interest for future wireless communication and sensing systems, has faced challenges in practice due to its complex and costly system architectures with massive antenna configuration and associated radio frequency chains. Multiplicative array (MA), which can achieve identical radiation pattern as the uniform rectangular array (URA) with much less antenna elements, is an established concept for array pattern synthesis. In this work, we introduce a novel half-apertured MA antenna pattern synthesis technique, which can achieve the same radiation pattern as the conventional MA (also same as the URA beamforming pattern) with only half the aperture of the MA design. It significantly reduces the required number of antenna elements and array aperture compared to URA and conventional MA while with no performance loss. Both numerical simulations and experimental validations have been performed to verify the effectiveness and flexibility of the proposed half-apertured MA (HMA). This innovation constitutes a significant advancement in MA design for pattern synthesis, offering promising applications in future research and implementations of large-scale arrays.