Time-Delay Digital Beamforming of Simultaneous Beams with 1.6 GHz Bandwidth using Direct-RF ADC

Radar systems using a hybrid of analog and digital beamforming suffer from significant drawbacks due to hardware scaling concerns, limiting multi-beam support. Digital time delay beamforming brings many benefits, such as wide bandwidth and multiple simultaneous beams at different angles, waveforms, and frequencies, with improved agility of scans between angles. A significant increase in the processing capabilities of FPGAs in this field has allowed for an increase to 14 simultaneous beams in a single device. This paper will present the design and implementation of a time delay digital beamformer with 1.6 GHz bandwidth running on an Altera Agilex™ Direct-RF FPGA with integrated data converters.