Phased Array

In wave theory, a phased array is a group of antennas in which the relative phases of the respective signals feeding the antennas are varied in such a way that the effective radiation pattern of the array is reinforced in a desired direction and suppressed in undesired directions


Different types of phased arrays

There are two main different types of phased arrays, also called beamformers. There are time domainbeamformers and frequency domain beamformers.

A time domain beamformer works, as the name says, by doing time-based operations. The basic operation is called "delay and sum". It delays the incoming signal from each array element by a certain amount of time, and then adds them together. Sometimes a multiplication with a window across the array is done to increase the mainlobe/sidelobe ratio, and to insert zeroes in the characteristic.

There are two different types of frequency domain beamformers. The first type separates the different frequency components that are present in the received signal into different frequency bins (using either an FFT or a filterbank). When different delay and sum beamformers are applied to each frequency bin, it is possible to point the main lobe to different directions for different frequencies. This can be an advantage for communication links.

The other type of frequency domain beamformers makes use of so called Spatial Frequency. This means that an FFT is taken across the different array elements, not in time. The output of the N point FFT are N channels, which are evenly divided in space. This approach makes a simple implementation of several beamformers at the same time possible, but this approach is not flexible, because the different directions are fixed.

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