Wideband Radio Frequency Interference Cancellation for High-Sensitivity Phased Array Receivers With True Time Delays and Truncated Hadamard Projection

Abstract

Radio frequency interference (RFI) is a significant challenge for high-sensitivity phased array instruments. RFI can be suppressed using digital signal processing, but to improve dynamic range for wideband RFI, it can be desirable to remove interference in the analog domain before sampling. In previous work, it has been shown that analog true time delay (TTD) stages with a truncated Hadamard transform can place a wide-band spatial null on RFI from a given direction of arrival. We show that TTD and Hadamard projection is mathematically equivalent to a bank of classical narrow-band subspace projection beamformers, but with a structure that allows efficient implementation in either analog circuitry or digital hardware. We analyze how loss in the TTD blocks and time delay errors affect beamformer performance and propose methods for calibrating time delays. Simulation results show that ideal TTD and Hadamard projection matches the bank of subspace projection beamformers and places deep nulls over wideband RFI signals while achieving SNR performance comparable to the maximum signal-to-interference and -noise ratio beamformer.