Electronically steerable directed energy using space-time network resonant digital systems

The ability to electronically steer a radio frequency (RF) beam to “illuminate” a target is fundamental to radar. Transmit beamformers are also needed in wireless communications. Wideband systems, based on direct bits-to-RF apertures, where digital streams are converted to RF using high-bandwidth data converters, that in turn, drive power amplifiers at each array element, is important for emerging wideband, multi-frequency multi-waveform applications. An electronically steerable transmit-beamformer based on space-time network-resonant infinite impulse response discrete systems is proposed for wideband directed energy applications. The proposed method leads to an order-of-magnitude lower digital multiplier count compared to the FIR filter based transmit arrays. Single-beam architectures are introduced. Simulations demonstrate the space-time domain and 2-D frequency domain behavior of the transmit beamformer for example input signals.