DiSiA-a digital chip design for smart antennas

Smart array antennas are well suited for optimising the signal to noise ratio in mobile communications. While the performance of smart array antennas rise by using more antenna elements, the digital signal processing of the element signals becomes more expensive for large antennas. Therefore, the digital signal processor DiSiA (Digital Signal processor for intelligent Antennas) was developed. Besides mixing and beamforming, the DiSiA does a distributed addition of the base band signals, in the case of receiving. An intelligent multiplex control enables the use of SDMA without needing all element signals in a central processing unit. In the case of transmitting, each DiSiA performs beamforming employing multiple independent signals. Simulation results show the overall performance of the signal path.