The TAP 111 Beamforming System
L. Rennie · 1981
he Three-Array Processor (TAP III) beamforming system incorporating both wide-band time-domain beamforming and narrow-band freqnency-domain beamforming is described. This paper briefly develops the beamforming theory and shows how the fast Fourier transform (FFT) is applied to accomplisb frequency- domain beamforming. The frequency-domain beamformer operates in the frequency domain to form beams and power spectrum data over narrow freqnency bands of interest. A real-time digital filtering technique is used to extract the narrow bands of interest from the broad-band inpnt signal. The frequency-domain beamformer ac- complishes real-time digital filtering and beamforming by using a high-speed array processor to do the complex calculations and data handling required by the algorithm. The time-domain beamformer operates in parallel with the frequency-domain beamformer to form up to 16 broad-band beams in the time domain. A programmable all-pass digital fdter is used to create the fine time delays required by the time-domain beamformer.