Wide‐band aperture array using a four‐channel manifold‐type planar multiplexer and digital 2‐D IIR filterbank

Emerging wide‐band communications and spectrum‐sensing systems demand support for multiple electronically scanned beams while maintaining a frequency independent, constant far‐field beam width. Realizing existing phased‐array technology on a digital scale is computationally intensive. Moreover, digitizing wide‐band signals at Nyquist rate requires complex high‐speed analog‐to‐digital converters (ADCs), which is challenging for real developments driven by the current ADC technology. A low‐complexity alternative proposed in this paper is the use of radio‐frequency (RF) channelizers for spectrum division followed by sub‐sampling of the RF sub‐bands, which results in extensive reduction of the necessary ADC operative frequency. The RF‐channelized array signals are directionally filtered using 2‐D digital filterbanks. This mixed‐domain RF/digital aperture array allows sub‐sampling, without utilizing multi‐rate 2‐D systolic arrays, which are difficult to realize in practice. Simulated examples showing 14–19 dB of rejection of wide‐band interference and noise for a processed bandwidth of 1.6 GHz are demonstrated. The sampling rate is 400 MHz. The proposed VLSI hardware uses a single‐phase clock signal of 400 MHz. Prototype hardware realizations and measurement using 65‐nm Xilinx field‐programmable gate arrays, as well as Cadence RTL synthesis results including gate counts, area‐time complexity, and dynamic power consumption for a 45‐nm CMOS circuit operating at B _DC = 1.1 V, are presented. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.