Efficient Calibration of RFSoC Full Digital Receiving Beamformer

The calibration and characterization of phased arrays usually requires the separate characterization of the antenna array and the RF circuitry. A method is presented to characterize them combined in one step for the case of a receiving phased array, as the beamforming algorithm only requires the combined characterization. The characterization results are directly used in the computation of the digital beamforming weights. The method is applied to an L band phased array with eight elements using the Xilinx radio frequency system on chip (RFSoC).