FPGA architectures for electronically scanned wide-band RF beams using 3-D FIR/IIR digital filters for rectangular array aperture receivers

Abstract

Real-time digital implementation of three-dimensional (3-D) infinite impulse response (IIR) beam filters are discussed. The 3-D IIR filter building blocks have filter coefficients, which are defined using algebraic closed-form expressions that are functions of desired beam personalities, such as the look-direction of the aperture, the bandwidth and sampling frequency of interest, inter antenna spacing, and 3dB beam size. Real-time steering of such 3-D beam filters are obtained by proposed calculation of filter coefficients. Application specific computing units for rapidly calculating the 3-D IIR filter coefficients at nanosecond speed potentially allows fast real-time tracking of low radar cross section (RCS) objects at close range. Proposed design consists of 3-D IIR beam filter with 4 4 antenna grid and the filter coefficient generation block in separate FPGAs. The hardware is designed and co-simulated using a Xilinx Virtex-6 XC6VLX240T FPGA. The 3-D filter operates over 90 MHz and filter coefficient computing structure can operate at up to 145 MHz.