Abstract: This paper proposes an array antenna synthesis technique based on differential evolution(DE) with matrix mapping for sparse rectangular planar arrays with multiple constraints. The constraints include the number of elements, the array aperture, and the minimum spacing between adjacent elements. With a novel matrix mapping between the element spacings and the variables of DE, the strong constrained optimization problem is simply transformed to an optimization problem with only lower and upper limit, and the infeasible solutions are naturally avoided. Simulation results confirm the great efficiency and the robustness of the proposed method and show that our method can achieve better results than the existing methods.