A Novel Receiver Architecture for DBF Antenna Array

The developments of the high speed analog to digital converters (ADC) and advanced digital signal processors (DSP) make the smart antenna with digital beamforming (DBF) a reality. In conventional M-elements array antenna system, each element has its own receiving channel and ADCs. In this paper, a novel smart antenna receiver with digital beamforming is proposed. The essential idea is to realize the digital beamforming receiver based on bandpass sampling of multiple distinct intermediate frequency (IF) signals. The proposed system reduces receiver hardware from M IF channels and 2M ADCs to one IF channel and one ADC using a heterodyne radio frequency (RF) circuitry and a multiple bandpass sampling digital receiver. In this scheme, the sampling rate of the ADC is much higher than the summation of the M times of the signal bandwidth. The local oscillator produces different local frequency for each RF channel. The receiver architecture is presented in detail, and the simulation of bandpass sampling of multiple signals and digital down conversion to baseband is given. The principle analysis and simulation results indicate the effectiveness of the new proposed receiver.