Two-dimensional unitary matrix pencil (2-D UMP) method is utilized for the synthesis of sparse planar arrays in this paper. By virtue of the equivalent matrix pencil obtained with a unitary transformation, 2-D positions including horizontal and vertical coordinates are directly found as the generalized eigenvalues of the real matrix pencils without solving poles. Owing to the utilization of a unitary transformation, the computational complexity can be significantly reduced since only the real computations are involved in the singular value decomposition (SVD) and eigenvalue decomposition (EVD) procedures. A representative numerical experiment is provided to assess the effectiveness and advantages of the proposed method.