Hardware implementation of digital beamforming network for Ultra Wide band signals using uniform linear arrays

This paper marks the first time in literature an attempt to realize the direct hardware implementation of Ultra Wide band (UWB) Digital Beam forming (DBF) in transmit and receive mode of UWB signals. A 1 GHz wide UWB signal is generated by a high speed arbitrary waveform generator (AWG) operating at 12 GS/s. The frequency band of interest was set to be 1GHz <; f <; 2GHz with a centre frequency of 1.5GHz. The output of AWG was transmitted by the Antipodal Tapered Slot Antenna (ATSA). At the receiver side, a four channel synchronous receiver, built with a uniform linear array (ULA) of 4 ATSAs, is employed with each channel operating at 4GS/s. A low complexity beamforming algorithm is applied to the received digitized data in order to form the desired beam pattern. Complete hardware setup was built and DBF was successfully achieved for a 1 GHz wide UWB signal having a centre frequency at 1.5 GHz.