TAP III Beamforming System

The Three Array Processor (TAP III) beamforming system incorporating both wideband time domain beamforming and narrowband frequency domain beamforming is described. The paper briefly develops the beamforming theory and shows how the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) is applied to accomplish frequency domain beamforming. The use of a digital filtering and decimation technique to achieve very narrow frequency resolutions (0.01 to 0.10 Hz) over operator selectable bands of interest is described. The frequency domain beamformer accomplishes real-time digital filtering and has a high data throughput by using a high-speed array processor to do the digital filtering and FFTs. The time domain beamformer utilizes a programmable all-pass digital filter to generate the required time delays and forms 16 beams in real time.