PhD Position in Multiple Beam Hybrid Array Antenna for Satcom and for 5G and Beyond (HybridBeams)

The next generation of wireless communication systems for civilian satellite and cellular applications demands highly directive and low-cost antennas generating multiple simultaneous co-frequency beams. The multibeam capability in antennas for Internet user terminals and base stations / phones is essential for smooth satellite / base station handover, throughput increase and improvement of link reliability. Due to its relatively lower implementation and processing complexity as compared to the fully-analog / fully-digital multibeam architectures, Hybrid Beam Forming (HBF) is currently seen as a promising alternative towards realizing this aim. However, the ambition for the future is to have several beams with permanent beam agility over a wide field-of-view and frequency range, which is not achievable with the currently proposed HBF schemes. Besides, the requirements on beam reconfigurability in a wide angular range and large bandwidth bring additional design challenges. Therefore, new fundamental approaches and further studies in HBF are required to address the current problems and prove its potential for future investments.

In this PhD project (HybridBeams), the objectives are to identify capabilities / limitations of a new HBF architecture based on reconfigurable multiport sub-arrays, and to propose novel synthesis and design solutions (both in hardware and signal processing) to address the limitations. The scientific challenges expected to be solved within the project include (i) reducing the complexity and losses in reconfigurable analog multibeam antenna feed circuits, (ii) increasing the number of beams with reasonable complexity, (iii) maintaining radiation properties (beam directions, gains, side lobe levels) over a wide field-of-view and bandwidth under practical design factors, (iv) obtaining low-cost use-case specific designs with modularity.

The candidate will join the MS3 group at TU Delft, who has built its expertise on years of research and development in the area of active phased array antennas with various sub-array based and sparsity based multiple beam generation concepts, in strong collaboration with NXP Semiconductors and European Space Agency in the Netherlands.