A versatile integrated acoustic beamforming system

A fully parallel, bit-serial, digital VLSI architecture developed primarily for time-domain beamforming of undersea acoustic signals from an arbitrarily shaped array of sensors is described. The architecture employs a simple, direct approach to interpolation. A small, eight-tap finite impulse response (FIR) interpolation filter operating at the data sample rate is embedded for each input and is used to estimate data values between sample points. The ICs can be combined at the board level to create processors with very high aggregate throughput rates. Through simple reconfiguration, the architecture can be used to perform the related operations of inverse beamforming, FIR filtering, and infinite impulse response (IIR) filtering. This architecture was specifically designed and partitioned to maximize versatility. Several primary digital-signal-processing (DSP) functions (delay, summation, multiplication, and filtering) are included