A Dynamically-Reconfigurable Phased Array Radar Processing System

Digital beam forming is an important radar processing technique used in many communication and radar sensing applications. This paper presents a low-cost digital beam forming system which takes advantage of four eight channel analog-to-digital (A-to-D) converter chips and dynamic FPGA reconfiguration. A full digital beam forming algorithm capable of forming up to 24 beams from 64 antenna input signals is described. FPGA reconfiguration is performed in 400 ms allowing for FPGA ret asking of the associated radar for weather and aircraft tracking. Beam forming performance of 64.2 GOPs per second for weather tracking and 72.2 GOPs per second for aircraft tracking is reported. The complete low cost digital beam forming board, including parts and assembly, costs less than $3,000.