Techniques for Distributed and Fast Beam Synthesis in Phased Arrays

Phased array-based systems must support the formation of beams with precise lobes and nulls in specific locations to operate effectively in complex environments with multiple users, objects, and interferers. Additionally, the ability to steer these non-conventional beam configurations rapidly is highly desirable. This talk presents state-of-the-art techniques for fast beam creation in phased arrays: (i) traditional beam table approaches that enable creation of arbitrary beam shapes and fast switching among them, but are constrained by the limited memory capacity of RF front-ends; (ii) on-chip linear phase slope beam calculators that enable fast steering among a large set of beams, though restricted to sinc-shaped beam patterns; (iii) A recently introduced approach for enabling the rapid steering in any arbitrary direction of arbitrary beam shapes including beams with nulls, wide lobed beams and multi-armed beams. The talk will present the mathematics of beam creation, circuit architectures as well as detailed spatial and temporal beam measurements. The first technique will be demonstrated with a beam switching latency (among 256 entries) of 120ns while the second and third techniques will be shown to achieve 200ns latency while providing >30000 beam steering directions.