Fast Factorized digital Beam Forming for Conformal Array

Digital beam forming (DBF) is capable of generating high resolution scanning patterns in pitch and azimuth dimension significant for electrical scanning. When the number of array elements is large and scanning resolution is high, the calculation complexity becomes a heavy burden for DBF method. In order to solve this problem, a subarray-based conformal array fast factorized DBF(FFDBF) algorithm is proposed. This method is based on the recursive principle to process subarray division and subarray beam forming in several levels. The lowest level subarray contains least array elements and smallest resolution of scanning pattern. The scanning patterns of lower level subarray are interpolated and added to form scanning pattern of higher level subarray. Following this method, a high-resolution scanning pattern of the whole array is formed and effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by simulation results.