High-Resolution Phased-Subarray MIMO Radar With Grating Lobe Cancellation Technique

A collocated phased-subarray multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) radar system that reduces the number of MIMO channels to implement a large antenna array is proposed. Both the transmitter (TX) and receiver (RX) arrays are divided into phased subarrays, which consist of several RF beamforming antenna elements. Each phased subarray is exploited as an MIMO channel. To estimate the angular information of targets, a hybrid beamforming technique that incorporates RF beamforming of the phased subarrays and digital beamforming of the MIMO virtual array is used. Antenna configurations of the phased-subarray MIMO radar and the corresponding virtual array are also presented. A space between the TX phased subarrays larger than one TX subarray aperture is introduced to facilitate the larger antenna aperture. Because this involves unwanted overall grating lobes, a grating lobe cancellation method is proposed using sum and difference RF subarray beams. This provides a higher angular resolution with the same number of antenna elements. The proposed phased-subarray MIMO radar concept with the corresponding grating lobe cancellation method is demonstrated by implementing a 60-GHz 16-element phased-subarray 2 x 2 MIMO frequency-modulated continuous-wave (FMCW) radar system.