Smart Antenna UKM Testbed for Digital Beamforming System

摘要

A new design of smart antenna testbed developed at UKM for digital beamforming purpose is proposed. The smart antennaUKM testbed developed based on modular design employing two novel designs of L-probe fed inverted hybrid E-H (LIEH)array antenna and software reconfigurable digital beamforming system (DBS). The antenna is developed based on using thenovel LIEH microstrip patch element design arranged into 4 x 1 uniform linear array antenna. An interface board is designedto interface to the ADC board with the RF front-end receiver. The modular concept of the system provides the capability to test theantenna hardware, beamforming unit, and beamforming algorithm in an independent manner, thus allowing the smart antennasystem to be developed and tested in parallel, hence reduces the design time. The DBS was developed using a high-performanceTMS320C6711~(TM)floating-point DSP board and a 4-channel RF front-end receiver developed in-house. An interface board isdesigned to interface to the ADC board with the RF front-end receiver. A four-element receiving array testbed at 1.88-2.22 GHzfrequency is constructed, and digital beamforming on this testbed is successfully demonstrated