Ultra-wideband on-site coding receiver (OSCR) for digital beamforming applications

Abstract

We present a novel low-cost reduced-hardware power efficient digital beamforming architecture suitable for wideband and large arrays. Particular to this realization is the introduction of an on-site code division multiplexing (CDM) technique at the analog front-end to significantly reduce the number of analog-to-digital converters (ADC). Concurrently, the number of parallel input/output (I/O) channels at the digital back-end are substantially reduced as well. This implies a corresponding reduction in the number of field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) for baseband processing as compared to conventional beamforming techniques. The impact of on-site coding on the overall signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) was evaluated and demonstrated that noise due to inter-channel interference (ICI) can be suppressed using brick-wall filters, high resolution ADC and orthogonal codes.