Improving the spurious performance of a digitised array reciever

Abstract

This paper presents the improvement of the spurious free dynamic range (SFDR) for digitisation using antenna arrays. Nonlinearities in the analogue-to-digital conversion degrade the overall SFDR of the digitisation process. We show that array processing, ie, the use of multiple sensors such as antennas or hydrophones with appropriate signal processing can improve the resulting SFDR at the beamform output. By taking advantage of spatial-temporal aliasing and the invisible regions, significant improvements can be obtained using linear, or more effectively, optimal beamforming.