Toward a novel architecture for beam steering of active phased-array antennas

This paper introduces an architecture capable of generating four mutually phase shifted radio frequency signals for beam steering of active phased array antennas (APAAs) to be eventually integrated into a single Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC). Targeting space and weight constrained applications, the proposed architecture features an 8051 IP-core and four custom DDS-PLL phase shifters based on synchronous delay-lines with programmable lengths. As a first step towards the ASIC realization of the system, the proposed architecture has been implemented and tested for functional correctness through a hybrid prototype based on an Altera DE2-115 board and a custom four channel PLL board.