Design Of Active Phased Array Antenna Wave Control System

With the rapid development of the RF and digital integrated circuit technology, the cost of the active phased array antenna has been under control, with its applications extended. As one of the most important components of the active phased array antenna, the beam steering system has a significant influence on the system performance, including the pointing accuracy and the beam response time. It becomes more and more meaningful for designing high-performance beam steering circuit, with fast speed of computation, precise compensation for the phase and amplitude, complete control function, miniaturized and modularized structure.Aiming at the requirement of one multichannel phased array radar system, the implementation scheme of hierarchical beam steering system is proposed. The systematic hardware design is accomplished, including the design of the mother board and daughter board, the design of the data transmission and interface protocols of the beam steering system. The detailed design, programing, debugging and testing of the software of the beam steering system are achieved, including the design of up-level computer program and the design of the FPGA program. The main function of the FPGA program is the real-time computation of the phase and the driver function of the phase shifter. The up-level computer program consists of two parts, the controlling and displaying module and the up-level computer module. With the up-level computer mode, the centralized computing and controlling method is realized. Finally, the multichannel phased array antenna system is tested in the dark chamber, verifying the accuracy and reliability of the beam steering system designed in this paper. The pointing accuracy, the minimum granularity of the beam, and the implementation of the beamforming and the result of amplitude weighting have been measured.