Pulse Splitting Technique for Low Sidelobe Time-Modulated Antenna Array Synthesis with Harmonic Suppression

In this paper, pulse splitting approach is proposed to simultaneously reduce the sidelobe level (SLL) of fundamental signal and maximum sideband levels (SBLs) of harmonic signals for time-modulated linear array (TMLA). This is achieved by controlling only the periodic switching time sequence of each element of the TMLA. In pulse splitting, the on-off switching sequence of each radiating element is characterized by multiple rectangular sub-pulses within the modulation period which increase the degrees of freedom in order to better synthesize the desired fundamental pattern with simultaneous suppression of harmonic or sideband radiation. A genetic algorithm (GA) is employed to optimize the switch-on and switch-off instants of each sub-pulse for each element for 16-element uniform amplitude, phase, and space linear antenna array. The simulation results reveal that the proposed method can achieve the desired patterns with very low SLL and SBLs compared with previous published results.