Beamforming in Micro-strip Phased Array Antenna through Optimal Phase Angle Rounding-Off Technique

The performance and efficacy of a Phased Array Antenna System (PAAS) can be largely enhanced by efficient beamforming techniques. The PAAS typically uses Digital Phase Shifter (DPS) to attain directional beamforming. The beam quantization effects, resulted due to the use of DPS, can be minimized by the use of innovative beamforming methods. Phase Angle Rounding-Off (PARO) techniques achieve near-continuous beamforming, even when using lower-bit DPS elements. Micro-strip or patch antenna are being widely used not only in commercial applications like mobile phones or medical equipment, but also in defence application like target sensors or telemetry systems. In this paper, we use Optimal-PARO (O-PARO) method of beamforming for a micro-strip array antenna, designed in C-band, for airborne communication receiver application. The use of O-PARO results in significantly reducing the scan steps of the array antenna, with high fidelity of beam pointing. Conversely, low-bit DPS can be used in the PAAS, when employing the O-PARO method, to achieve performance equivalent to larger-bit DPS, which has been demonstrated in this paper via simulations.