Part 2: Achieving phase repeatability Phase Sync in Digital Phased Arrays Through Direct RF Sampling

A practical hardware–software approach demonstrates how precise phase repeatability can be achieved in digital phased arrays across power cycles.

An all-digital beamforming radar system is dependent on the degree to which the transmit and receive channels are synchronised. Since the phases to all channels are applied in the digital domain, there arises a need to establish a known phase and repeatable difference between all the channels. This article discusses a methodology to synchronise multiple modular circuit boards, equipped with high speed data converters, to build a concept of a scalable digital beamforming system. This work involves achieving phase repeatability over power cycles by syncing multiple mixed-signal front-end (MxFE®) integrated circuits (ICs), a four-transmit and four-receive data converter with high on-chip digital signal processing (DSP) capability.