A high-speed adaptive antenna array with simultaneous multiple-beamforming capability

A new type of adaptive beamforming antenna system architecture is developed for multi-channel wireless communications. Multi-beam beamforming with high data throughput is accomplished using the proposed beamformer architecture consisting of analog mixers and multi-tone direct digital synthesizers (DDS). The multi-beam beamformer is based on a multi-tone weighting scheme combined with analog-digital hybrid signal processing. High-speed real-time beamforming is realized by an analog beamformer circuit, while the flexibility on adaptive beamforming algorithms is retained by computing weighting coefficients using the digital signal processor (DSP). A 5.8 GHz eight-element adaptive beamforming array successfully demonstrates two-beam simultaneous beamforming and two-channel data recovery at 25 Mb/s data throughput in each channel with BPSK modulation, based on SDMA (space division multiple access).