A comparison of active phased array, corporate beamforming architectures

We compare two common receive beamformer architectures used in active phased arrays to generate low side lobe sum patterns. We consider the architectural complexity and receive performance (noise figure and output intercept point) for the two beamformers. In addition, we discuss wide-band, time delay steered, subarray implementations of both architectures. Finally, we present a hybrid architecture, in which the amplitude taper partially is applied actively in the transmit/receive (T/R) module's receive VGA and partially created from non-uniform combiners.