FPGA Implementation of an Efficient Phase Shift Beamformer for Narrow Band Sub-GHz Applications

Abstract

Beams are formed by multi-element arrays. These beams are focused on the direction of arriving signals, with an intention of maximizing the received signal power. The signals with noise and interference arrived from a distinct direction will be estimated by ULA (Uniform Linear Array) with 10 antenna elements. An emerging signal will be phase-shifted with the help of phase shift beamformer. The vector angle is computed from the signal cluster by using Coordinate Rotation Digital Computer (CORDIC) algorithm. This algorithm can be employed in the view of finding phase shift and frequency offset. As Beamformer assumes the incoming signal as narrow banded, a phase shift can approximate the required delay and perpetuates the incoming signal strength. The beamformer is implemented in Xilinx Vivado for simulation and synthesized using both Virtex-7 and Spartan-7 FPGA devices and their results are compared. From the obtained results, it is evident that the proposed design is formidable pertaining to power and delay. This design can operate at 100MHZ with total on-chip power consumption of 725mW.