A novel design of sharp transition FIR filter for digital beamforming

This paper proposes a new approach to the design of linear phase, equiripple response, lowpass FIR filter for digital beamforming applications. The simple filter design without optimizations has sharp transition, good stopband attenuation with less filter complexity. An uniform linear array beamformer with a narrow transition bandwidth and low side lobes is synthesized with fewer sensor elements. This is achieved by using the proposed filters as subfilters in the frequency response masking approach. Precise and independent specification of main beamwidth and side lobe level for the beamformer is possible.