System Design of a Multichannel Automatic Test and Data Acquisition System for Digital Phased Array Antennas

Digital phased array antennas (DPAAs) have been widely used in modern radar systems. The flexible production and testing of large-scale DPAAs are becoming a hot research topic. The dedicated calibration elements are passive because they do not have transmitter and receiver modules. These elements cannot be used to test DPAAs. In this paper, we design a multichannel automatic test and data acquisition system for DPAAs. Our motivation is to use the system to verify the correctness and stability of an entire DPAA. The system can achieve snapshot data acquisition of 1152 optical fibers, and it can also process echo data in real time by digital beam forming (DBF) and record the processing results. At present, the system has been put into production for testing of large-scale DPAAs, and it can test the DPAA flexibly and steadily.