Design and Performance Analysis of a Fixed-Point Based Beamforming Coefficient Calculator for Beamforming of a Digital Active Array Radar

Abstract

In this study, a fixed-point-based beamforming coefficient calculator is proposed for the beamforming of a digital active array radar. Floating-point-based calculations enable precise calculations but have the disadvantages of high computational complexity and latency. To complement this, the proposed fixed-point-based beamforming coefficient calculation had a high signal to quantization noise ratio (SQNR) of 51.35 dB and the beam steering angle error was between −0.05° and 0.05° when compared with those of the floating-point calculation; these satisfied the system requirements. The proposed fixed-point-based beamforming coefficient calculator was implemented on a Xilinx Kintex UltraScale FPGA. It could reduce 54.94 % CLB register, 44.33 % CLB LUT, 60 % DSP slice, and −58.16 % latency than the floating-point calculator. Furthermore, at small beam pattern powers, the performance degradation of the calculator was less compared with previous research.