On the phase interferometry direction finding: Performance comparison and FPGA implementations

Direction finding (DF) system employing phase interferometer of long baselines provides high accuracy of Angle Of Arrival (AOA), however, it also implicates phase ambiguity and phase error. The main contribution of this paper involves two parts. The first one concerns the performance comparison of three algorithms applied for determination of unambiguous AOA using simulations. These algorithms are the Second-Order Difference Array (SODA), CORRelative (CORR) interferometer, and Phase Rotation Algorithm (PRA). In the second part, an efficient Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) implementation of PRA, is proposed and compared to the implementation of SODA and CORR algorithms. The proposed architectures allows an important optimization of the required FPGA hardware resources utilization.