Coding-based ultra-wideband digital beamformer with significant hardware reduction

Abstract

We propose a novel transceiver architecture for cognitive sensing. The architecture supports agile beam forming, jamming mitigation, as well as MIMO communications. An essential aspect of the new architecture is its departure from the traditional digital beamforming approaches. Specifically, a single ADC is assigned to a group of array elements instead of having one ADC per element. To facilitate this approach, code division multiplexing is applied to each received antenna signal prior to combining them for digitization using a single ADC. Thus full signal recovery is possible at digital baseband via decoding. The proposed architecture significantly reduces the number of ADCs and I/O channels and hence drastically improves size, weight, area, power and cost of the system with minimal impact on receiver signal-to-noise ratios.