Fast Beam Steering Control of Arrays Using Low-Cost Single Board Computers

Modern active electronically steered arrays (AESAs) enable highly directional electronic beamforming techniques with an aperture that has a fixed, physically small footprint. By utilizing beamforming radio frequency integrated circuits (RFICs) instead of a digital beamformer, such AESAs can be manufactured in a modular form factor with an industry standard control interface. Modern analog beamforming AESA architecture also decouples the array panel and controller from the radio, greatly reducing communication system complexity. The current practice for designing AESA controllers involves the creation of unique firmware-based controllers that must be designed for a specific AESA panel. Such controllers are expensive to develop and inhibit the modularity of the panel while offering limited functionality to the end-user and hindering future system upgrades. By moving AESA control from firmware to software with a commercial of the shelf (COTS) single-board computer (SBC), the expense of an AESA controller can be greatly reduced in terms of both the non-recurring engineering (NRE) and controller hardware cost. This design approach also creates a reusable software framework that can be quickly modified for controlling different AESA panels with the same low-cost controller. This paper explains how to implement AESA beam steering in software and then demonstrates the performance of a SBC AESA controller that was created with a Raspberry Pi 4 and a low-cost printed circuit board (PCB) daughter card.