Low power beamforming RF architecture enabling fine ranging and AOA techniques

This work presents the advantages and capabilities of the UWB beamforming RF architecture introduced in [1]. The proposed system gathers the functionalities of high ranging accuracy and angle of arrival (AOA) techniques. In addition, the system has been designed to dissipate low power. This performance is achieved thanks to a double quadrature receiver. Ranging simulation shows a 1.1cm standard deviation at 6m range using a 15.6MHz pulse repetition frequency (PRF). This accuracy can be extended to 20m range by using a 1.5MHz PRF. Otherwise, at 6m, AOA has been estimated to have a root mean square error (RMSE) lower than 1° in the ±50° aperture. The simulation results prove that this architecture is robust against channel noise and RF impairments.