A Flexible Phased-Array Architecture for Reception and Rapid Direction-of-Arrival Finding Utilizing Pseudo-Random Antenna Weight Modulation and Compressive Sampling

Abstract

The direct space-to-information converter (DSIC) unifies conventional delay-and-sum analog conventional beamforming (CBF) with compressive sampling (CS) rapid direction-of-arrival (DOA) finding into a single, reconfigurable phased-array receiver architecture. Where current CBF-based DOA scanners need to exhaustively search through multiple DOA angles, the DSIC is able to receive energy from all possible angles by modulating its antenna weights psuedo-randomly. The DSIC RF-ASIC can operate from 1 to 3 GHz, was fabricated in 65-nm CMOS, and includes eight direct-conversion paths each delivering 32-dB conversion gain, 3.3-dBm in-band IIP3, and 6.4-dB NF while consuming 19.8 mW from 1.2 V. The DSIC RF-ASIC has two modes of operation, CS-DOA and CBF-Reception and can switch between them in less than $1~\mu \text{s}$ . In CS-DOA mode, the DSIC RF-ASIC finds the DOA of a single signal in $1~\mu \text{s}$ consuming 158 nJ which is 4 $\times $ faster and 1.5 $\times $ less energy than a comparable CBF-based DOA scanner.