The ADAR1000 has specifically been designed for the ADEF market and is particularly suitable for Phased Array Radar applications due to the frequency coverage and configuration.
It is an integrated four channel X and Ku band beamforming core chip for phased array radar applications specified over the 8 to 16GHz frequency band. The high level of integration, coupled with a small 7mm square LGA package housing a monolithic SiGe chip addresses some of the size, weight and power challenges in high channel count phased array architectures.
The primary function of the chip is to accurately set the relative gain and phase of each channel so signals add coherently in the desired direction. It has four identical transmit and receive channels for time division duplex (TDD) operation. The chip is designed with ease of use in mind and minimizes the external component count by having functionality on board such as on chip power amplifier (PA) and low noise amplifier (LNA) bias controls utilizing five integrated digital to analog converters and power detectors for power monitoring. This facilitates considerably the interfacing to external transmit and receive modules (TRMs).
The chip also contains an ADC for sampling the outputs of the four power detectors and the temperature sensor, an active function in the on board temperature compensation loop. Transmit and receive control is via a single pin and a simple four wire SPI is used to program and control the on chip registers.
The device has a 360 Degree phase adjustment range and >31dB of gain adjustment with better than 6 bits of resolution. There is enough on board random access memory to store up to 121 prestored beam positions and up to seven bias settings for transmit and receive modes.
Nominal and low operating power modes allow the user to trade off performance in power sensitive applications. Dedicated transmit and receive pins provide synchronization of all core chips in an array making it an ideal scalable building block in multi channel radar systems.