A novel digital beamforming approach with single microwave digital receiver

This paper proposes a novel low-cost array digital beamforming (DBF) concept by using only a single microwave digital receiver and chirp signals. The proposed system uses a microwave switch to select echo signals from an N-element phased array so that the number of required microwave digital receivers is reduced from N to one for considerable cost reduction. Typical low-cost DBF systems have severe constraints on the switching speed of diode signal switch and the computation power of the signal processor. Taking these constraints into consideration, the authors have developed two signal selection schemes that optimize the beamforming resolution. Simulation results suggest that the performance of the proposed system under designated application scenarios is comparable to more expensive conventional DBF systems.