Efficient Implementation of Direction of Arrival Using RFSoC Platform

This paper presents a method for efficient hardware implementation of direction of arrival (DoA) estimation using Zynq UltraScale+ Radio Frequency System on Chip (RFSoC) ZCU216 Evaluation board. The RFSoC contains 4 ADC tiles, each with different phase lock loops (PLL) and clock signals, leading to random phase shifts between the receivers. Multi Tile Synchronization and Calibration of ADCs are incorporated before receiving RF signals from the antenna array to estimate the accurate DoA. The Multiple Signal Classification (MUSIC) algorithm is used to estimate the DoA, which has high resolution but has more computational complexity. To account for this, this paper presents a method to reduce the number of iterations for calculating the peak of the spectrum function using the MUSIC algorithm. To validate this, an image is transmitted as an LTE signal and received using a $1 \times 4$ linear antenna array. The DoA measurement is performed in the anechoic chamber, and measurements show that the direction of received signals can be predicted accurately using this DoA estimation method.