Synthesis and Array Processor Realization of a 2-D IIR Beam Filter for Wireless Applications

A broadband digital beamforming algorithm is proposed for directional filtering of temporally-broadband bandpass space-time plane-waves at radio frequencies (RFs). The enhancement of desired waves, as well as rejection of undesired interfering plane-waves, is simulated. A systolic- and wavefront-array architecture is proposed for the real-time implementation of second-order spatially-bandpass (SBP) 2-D infinite impulse response (IIR) beam filters having potential applications in broadband beamforming of temporally down-converted RF signals. The higher speed of operation and potentially reduced power consumption of the asynchronous architecture of wavefront-array processors (WAPs) in comparison to the conventional synchronous hardware has emerging applications in radio-astronomy, radar, navigation, space science, cognitive radio, and wireless communications. Further, the bit error rate (BER) performance improvement along with the reduced computational complexity of the 2-D IIR SBP frequency-planar digital filter over digital phased array feed (PAF) beamformer is provided. A nominal BER versus signal-to-interference ratio (SIR) gain of 10-16 dB compared to case where beamforming is not applied, and a gain of 2-3 dB at approximately half the number of parallel multipliers to digital PAF, are observed. The results of application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) synthesis of the digital filter designs are also presented.