Electronically scanned RF-to-bits beam aperture arrays using 2-D IIR spatially bandpass digital filters

A beamforming system based on two-dimensional (2-D) spatially bandpass infinite impulse response (IIR) plane wave filtering is presented in a multi-dimensional signal processing perspective and the implementation details are discussed. Real-time implementation of such beamforming systems requires modeling of computational electromagnetics for the antennas, radio frequency (RF) analog design aspects for low-noise amplifiers (LNAs), mixed-signal aspects for signal quantization and sampling and finally, digital architectures for the spatially bandpass plane wave filters proposed in Joshi et al. (IEEE Trans Very Large Scale Integr Syst 20(12):2241–2254, 2012). Multi-dimensional spatio-temporal spectral properties of down-converted RF plane wave signals are reviewed and derivation of the spatially bandpass filter transfer function is presented. An example of a wideband antipodal Vivaldi antenna is simulated at 1 GHz. Potential RF receiver chains are identified including a design of a tunable combline microstrip bandpass filter with tuning range 0.8–1.1 GHz. The 1st-order sensitivity analysis of the beam filter 2-D z-domain transfer function shows that for a 12-bits of fixed-point precision, the maximum percentage error in the 2-D magnitude A. Madanayake · C. Wijenayake (B) · R. Joshi Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, The University of Akron, Akron, OH, USA e-mail: [email protected] A. Madanayake e-mail: [email protected] M. Almalkawi · V. Devabhaktuni Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, The University of Toledo, Toledo, OH, USA e-mail: [email protected] V. Devabhaktuni e-mail: [email protected] L. Belostotski · L. Bruton Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, The University of Calgary, Calgary, AB, Canada e-mail: [email protected] L. Bruton e-mail: [email protected]