Dense transmit and receive phased arrays

Abstract

A dense antenna array architecture is developed to ease the circuit requirements of the radio frequency (RF) front-end in beamforming applications. In the architecture, antennas are spaced more closely than required by the sampling principle to exploit the available degrees of freedom. This array structure is analogous to temporally oversampled data conversion systems, which have reduced quantizer resolution requirements. In, we have developed a spatial-domain version of ΔΣ quantization, and have shown that with binary quantization for the in-phase and quadrature components of antenna weights, modest amounts of oversampling can reproduce beamforming patterns of interest to practically useful levels of accuracy. In this paper, we incorporate mutual coupling between antennas and impedance matching in the over-sampling scheme and analyze their effects on the performance of this dense-array architecture. These effects do not change the validity of the dense array.