Beam Former George
- Katie Christiansen
- Weston McEvoy
- Luke Hanley
- Taylor Stevenson
- Erika Antunez
- Gabriel Vitti
Team Name: Grooving Shredders
Sponsor Name: Augustus Aerospace
Our project demonstrates the value of beamforming in RF communication by using a phased antenna array and FPGA fabric to digitally beamform. Beamforming allows arrays of antennas to transmit or receive signals in one specified physical direction, which allows more efficient, reliable, and secure RF data transfer. We built a software-defined radio to receive signals from the direction of our choosing. What makes our product special is that the digital signal processing that allows us to beamform is done in FPGA fabric, allowing us to perform operations on billions of samples of data extremely fast. We used the RFSoC 4x2 Kit from Xilinx, which is an extremely new and sophisticated piece of hardware and is why Augustus Aerospace was interested in this project. Lastly, our project also features a test system that allows us to generate radiation patterns for our antenna array, which allows us to quantify the beamforming itself.