A low cost radar digital beamforming concept with single receiver

This paper presents a novel low-cost radar digital beamforming system concept with only a single microwave digital receiver. The proposed concept uses a microwave switch to select echo signals from an N-element array so that the number of required microwave digital receivers is reduced from N to 1 for drastic cost reduction. Typical low-cost DBF systems have severe constraints on the switching speed of diode signal switches and the computation power of the signal processor. Taking these constraints into consideration, the authors have developed a time-division multiplexing (TDM) signal selection scheme that optimize the beamforming resolution. Simulation results suggest that the performance of the proposed system under some application scenarios is comparable to more costly conventional DBF systems based on multiple receivers.