An S-FSCW based multi-channel reader system for beamforming applications using surface acoustic wave sensors

In this paper, we present a novel surface acoustic wave (SAW) reader system featuring four parallel transceiver channels and high-speed parallelized baseband electronics. The performance of the system is demonstrated on classical beamforming applications, including angle of arrival measurement of single SAW tags and the angular separation of multiple superposing SAW sensor responses. Using a multi-input multi-output approach, a larger virtual array and thus a larger aperture can be synthesized, which leads to significantly better angular separation results.