Wideband Digital Beamforming and Direction Finding

Recent advances in digital receiver technology have the potential to revolutionize electronic warfare (EW) receiver design and dramatically increase capability. With wideband digitization come high data buffering and processing loads which stresscomputational resources. Two novel ESM architecture concepts are proposed that significantly reduce the amount of data to be processed. The proposed architectures combine hardware-based ESM techniques with advanced signal processing techniques to simplifydata acquisition while enabling the capability of performing advanced array processing techniques such as adaptive interference cancellation and high-resolution angle-of-arrival (AoA) estimation for wideband radar signals. In addition, advanced signalprocessing techniques specifically developed for the analysis of non-stationary signals will be exploited to deinterleave and characterize more challenging emitters. Super resolution techniques, modified for wide bandwidth, will be applied to estimateAoA. The proposed approach offers simplicity and reduced computational load while enabling advanced capability in wideband digital beamforming, direction finding, and interference cancellation.