An effective synthesis of planar array antennas for producing near-field contoured patterns

We present an efficient procedure for the synthesis of planar array antennas to radiate contoured patterns in the near zone of array aperture, as desired in RFID applications. It first grids the target area, and then utilizes a global basis set to span the array's excitations. Each basis's excitation of the array radiates a focused spot beam in the near zone and serves as a local basis function for representing the radiation field. The unknown coefficients of the array's basis set are then found via a minimum least square error (MLSE) technique. It is found that only a small number of basis functions are sufficient to synthesize the radiation pattern, and make the present approach very fast.