Electronic Beam Steering Using PLL Array for Radar

Applications in W-band
Bo Shi, Siew-Weng Leong, Alda Mulya, Bin Luo, Wenjiang Wang
Institute for Infocomm Research, A*STAR
Singapore

AbstractA phase-locked loop (PLL) array has been developed
to perform electronic beam steering at W-band (76-77 GHz) for
radar applications. It uses external current injection into the
outputs of the charge pump (CP) in the frequency synthesizers to
adjust the phase of the voltage control oscillators (VCO) in the
PLL array. The measurement array radiation pattern is
presented.
Index TermsPhase locked loop, Electronic Beam Steering,
Radar, Phase Shifter
II. INJECTION LOCKED PLL
The phase error of a PLL can be controlled by adding an
external DC offset voltage to the output of the phase detector
as shown in Fig. 1. In [6], this was exploited for phase shifting
and was demonstrated at intermediate frequency (IF) of 41
MHz and up-converted to about 1.5 GHz using a cascaded PLL
topology.

I. INTRODUCTION
There are many interests for radar applications operating in
the W-band frequency. An area of interests is in automotive
radars used for Automatic Cruise Control (ACC) and anti-
collision. The radars are operating at 77 / 79 GHz [1] and
exploit electronic beam steering or mechanical positioning to
scan beam. There are also recent developments for receiver
phased array for scanning [2] and phased array radar
transmitter using cascadable transceiver [3] in this frequency
band. Another area of interests is in unmanned aerial vehicles Fig. 1. PLL with external voltage for phase control
(UAV). There have been developments of synthetic aperture
radars (SAR) operating at 94 GHz [4-5] for UAV applications. Referring to Fig. 1, the steady state phase difference
between the reference input phase (r) and VCO output phase
Traditionally, transmitter electronic beam steering is
(o) is given in Eq. 1:
usually accomplished by using phase shifters before the
radiating elements in an antenna array. At this time of writing,

commercial available programmable phase shifter integrated-  (1)
circuit chips operate to about 40 GHz. They also exhibit high
insertion loss. As such there are no suitable commercial off the where Kp and KV are the gain of the phase detector and the
shelf (COTS) phase shifter chips at W-band. Besides using voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO) respectively, i is the phase
phase shifters, the function of phase shifting can also be of the input signal, o is the phase of the VCO output, e is the
performed by using the principle of injection locking of several loops phase shift, o is the centre frequency of the VCO and
phase-locked loops (PLLs) [6]. The idea of injection locking F(0) is the DC gain of the loop filter. If the DC loop gain,
was reported in [7] [8] using coupled PLLs but without charge KVKpF(0), is sufficiently large, then the phase shift between the
pump (CP) circuit. However, this is required in implementation VCO output and the reference input is directly proportional to
in most modern PLL designs to meet the users requirements. the external applied control voltage Vc.
In [6], beam steering using PLL was demonstrated at a low
frequency of 41 MHz. But, there are challenges to scale this
approach to W-band.  (2)

In this paper, the technique of external injection-controlled
signal (using current source) for CP-PLL is developed and Therefore, the phase of the VCO can be linearly controlled
implemented in a 76-77 GHz phased array for beam steering in by offset voltage Vc. However, in today PLL the output of the
radar applications. The architecture can be applied to other phase detector is implemented using a charge pump (CP)
frequency band such as ISM band at 94 GHz by replacing the which is a switching current source. As such, this phase control
VCO in the PLL. should be a current source instead, as shown in Fig. 2.

978-1-4673-7297-8/15/$31.00 2015
c IEEE 274

Fig. 2. PLL phase shifter at 76 to 77 GHz
The injection locked PLL is implemented with a COTS
frequency synthesizer and a silicon germanium (SiGe) radar
transceiver with a VCO operating in 76-77 GHz. The PLL is
configured in an offset-PLL configuration. This is shown in
Fig. 2.
The offset-PLL configuration with a mixer will yield a
better phase noise since the division ratio in the frequency
synthesizer is reduced compared to a traditional PLL. With the
VCO operating at 76 GHz and a division ratio of 4, it gives 19
GHz to the RF port of the mixer. Using an 18 GHz local
oscillator (LO), the IF port of the mixer is 1 GHz and is feed to
the prescaler (N divider). The phase frequency detector (PFD)
operates at 10 MHz by comparing the external reference
frequency and the output frequency from the prescaler. Thus,
the overall division ratio of the PLL is 400. Without the mixer,
the overall division ratio will be 7600 and the phase noise will
affect the system. The charge pump (CP) produces a current,
which is proportional to the phase error, to the low-pass loop
filter (LPF). The LPF is then connected to the VCO whose
output is fed into a RF feed network which forms the antenna
array for beam steering. The phase of the VCO is controlled by
the current source, Ic, injected at the output of the CP.
Fig. 3. Phased Array using PLL phase shifters
2015 IEEE 5th Asia-Pacific Conference on Synthetic Aperture Radar(APSAR)
Fig. 4. Assembled PCB for PLL array
III. IIMPLEMENTATION OF PHASED ARRAY
An array of four elements is being implemented using the
PLL phase shifter shown in Fig. 2 to demonstrate the beam
steering function at 76 to 77 GHz using a new parallel feed
topology of injection controlled PLL array for phase array. The
setup is shown in Fig. 3, where the four PLL sub-systems from
Fig. 2 are inter-connected by feeding networks using power
splitters. Output signal from each PLL is then connected and
added to form an antenna array for beam steering. The four
PLLs are implemented on a single printed circuit board as
shown in Fig. 4.
The two 4-way power splitters divide the power equally for
the 10 MHz reference oscillator and the 18 GHz local
oscillator. They are fed to the respective PLL inputs. The
output of each PLL unit is fed to Ant1 to Ant4. Using PLL1 as
the reference with the phase of its output remaining unchanged,
the digital to analog converter (DAC) provides the control
currents IC2 to IC4 for PLL2 to PLL4. The output of the DAC
module is a voltage source and is then converted to a current
source using a large resistor. Each of the inject-controlled
current source provides independent control of the phase of
each PLL and hence each antenna element in the array. The
antenna array is a custom designed sectorized horn antennas.
Each antenna element has a gain of 15 dBi and the separation
between each element is 1.95 mm.
Fig. 5 shows a photo of the measurement setup. The entire
phase array system is mounted at the centre of a motorized
turntable and the test area is surrounded with absorbers panels.
At the receiver end, a W-band standard gain horn antenna is
connected to a spectrum analyzer. The turntable is positioned at
the boresight, 0 origin, initially and the phases of the array
elements are controlled to achieve a maximum radiation at
boresight first. The current source in each of these three PLLs
is tuned to steer the radiated beam. The power radiated from
the system is recorded at every 0.5 step revolution.
IV. MEASUREMENT RESULTS
The measurement is done automatically using Labview
from National Instrument. It controls the DAC, motorized
turntable and the spectrum analyzer to record and plot the
radiation pattern of the phased array.
275
 [6] P. V. Brennan and A. W. Houghton, Phased Array Beam
Steering using phase-locked loop, IEE Electronic Letters, pp.
165-166, Febuary 1990.
[7] B. Razavi, A Study of Injection Locking and Pulling in
Oscillators, IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits, Vol. 39, No.
9, pp. 1415-1424, Sept 2004.
[8] R. A. York and T. Itoh, Injection- and Phase-Locking
Techniques for Beam Control, IEEE Trans. Microwave Theory
& Tech., Vol. 46, No. 11, pp. 1920-1929, November 1999.

Fig. 5. Measurement setup

To verify the PLL phase shifter, the phase between the

reference PLL (Ant1) and the adjacent PLL (Ant2) is measured
and the result is plotted in Fig. 6. A phase shift of 360 is
obtained by tuning the output voltage from the DAC. It is
noticed that the measured phase shift is quite linear. Similar
results are also observed between the other PLLs. Fig. 6. Measured phase shift between two PLLs versus control
Fig. 7 and Fig. 8 give the measured radiation plots for a voltage from the DAC
scan angle of +/-10 and +/-20, respectively, using continuous
wave (CW) at about 76.2 GHz. Side-lobes tend to increase as
the radiated beam scans from 0 to +/-20 in the phased array.
Slight asymmetry is observed in the measured main lobe.
V. CONCLUSION
An injection lock PLL phase shifter array has been
developed at 76 to 77 GHz. The measured result shows the
feasibility of this concept. This approach can be applied to
other frequency band by using a different VCO.
REFERENCES
[1] http://www.etsi.org/technologiesclusters/technologies/intelligent
-transport/automotive-radar
[2] B. H. Ku, P. Schmalenberg, O. Inac, O. D. Gurbuz, J. S. Lee, K. Fig. 7. Measured radiation plot for a scan angle of +/-10
Shiozaki, G. M. Rebeiz, A 77-81 GHz 16-Element Phased-
Array Receiver with +/-50 Beam Scanning for Advanced
Automotive Radars, IEEE Transactions on Microwave Theory
and Techniques, vol. 62, no. 11, pp. 2823-2932, November
2014.
[3] C. Wagner, A. Stelzer, H. Jager, A phased-array radar
transmitter based on 77-GHz cascadable transceivers, in IEEE
Int. Microwave Symposium Digest, 2009, pp. 73-76.
[4] M Caris, S. Stanko, R. Sommer, A. Wahlen, A. Leuther, A.
Tessmann, M. Malanowski, P. Samczynski, K. Kulpa, etc.,
SARape Synthetic Aperture Radar for All Weather
Penetrating UAV Application, in Int. Radar Symposium (IRS),
2013, pp. 41-46.
[5] H. Essen, W. Johannes, S. Stanko, R. Sommer, A. Wahlen, J.
Wilcke, High resolution W-band UAV SAR, in IEEE Int.
Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium (IGARSS), 2012, Fig. 8. Measured radiation plot for a scan angle of +/-20
pp. 5033-5036.

276 2015 IEEE 5th Asia-Pacific Conference on Synthetic Aperture Radar(APSAR)