An 8-Element, 1-3GHz Direct Space-to-Information Converter for Rapid, Compressive-Sampling Direction-of-Arrival Finding Utilizing Pseudo-Random Antenna-Weight Modulation

The Direct Space-to-Information Converter (DSIC) unifies conventional delay-and-sum analog beamforming (CBF) with compressed-sampling (CS) rapid DoA finding into a single reconfigurable phased-array architecture. The DSIC chip includes 8 direct-conversion paths each delivering 32dB conversion gain, 3.3dBm in-band IIP3 and 6.4dB NF while consuming 19.8mW from 1.2V. The DSIC is able to switch between CBF-reception mode and CS-DoA mode in less than 1us. In CS-DoA mode, the DSIC finds the DoA of a single emitter in 1us consuming 158nJ which is 4x faster and 1.5x less energy than a comparable CBF scanner. For applications where many antennas are used, the DSIC uses an order of magnitude less energy than similar architectures.