A design and implementation of control logic of beam steering unit for phased array radar

Beam steering unit (BSU) is responsible for steering of the beam in Phased Array Radar [3] based on beam parameters it will shift the beam from one position to other position as directed by the radar Controller. The control logic of the unit is modelled in MATLAB, Simulated in Simulink and implemented in Hardware description language. The architecture of BSU consists of Single Board Computer (SBC) and an indigenously developed Array Interface Card (AIC). SBC will receive the beam Parameter from Radar Controller and calculates the Phase gradients and phase commands based on the different tables like standard table, collimation table, and Phase command table. The AIC is having a control logic, which is residing in an FPGA [18]. The AIC will interact with the SBC for receiving the phase command, Row number and column number of the phase shifters in the phased array. The control logic will decode the data into suitable format and converts into serial format for loading the data into phase shifters. The data will be loaded serially in each sector and parallel in other sectors of the antenna. With this design method the loading time achieved is 2.2msec. This unit can be used for different phased arrays [3] with varying antenna dimensions.