Hardware implementation of wideband time domain Robust Capon Beamforming

Capon Beamforming algorithm is an optimal spatial filtering algorithm used in various signal processing applications where excellent interference rejection performance is required, such as Radar and Sonar systems, Smart Antenna systems for wireless communications. Its lack of robustness, however, means that it is vulnerable to array calibration errors and other model errors. To overcome this problem, numerous Robust Capon beamforming algorithms have been proposed, which are much more promising for practical applications. In this paper, an FPGA implementation of a Robust Capon Beamforming algorithm is investigated and presented, which deals with wideband real-valued signals in time domain. This realization takes an array input with 8 channels, computes the adaptive weight vectors for beamforming with an 18 bit fixed-point representation and runs at an 80 MHz clock on Xilinx V4 FPGA. The outcomes will be applied to a medical imaging project.