Cell Antenna Beamformer
This client was a cell antenna company that had just won a contract to deploy new infrastructure abroad in Cyprus and Nigeria serving millions of users. Their engineers had a full workload in designing a new 64-QAM phased-array antenna, so they called in our engineers to build their beamformer. This antenna system would be deployed in two wildly different environments, one largely urban, the other largely rural, which constrained the design in unusual ways.
We designed the system's 4x8 beamformer and power divider which sits between the radio and the antenna. This subsystem, like many others, is vital to the phased array behavior used heavily in new 5G-capable antennas. It takes in a phased signal, divides it into multiple output paths, applies phase delays, and feeds into the antenna element.
These technologies are well-established: we didn't have to invent anything new yet the finished PCB had to be highly precise. It takes a team of experts to ensure that every aspect of the beamformer would work perfectly. We designed the beamformer with four rat-race couplers, drew the PCB using the industry's microstrip equations, ordered it to be printed, and used a 16-port vector network analyzer to test the system meticulously.
In the end we and the client both approved our design for production, and to our knowledge these beamformers are currently deployed serving millions of users. The different environments of Cyprus and Nigeria guided our design towards building a highly flexible system yet with abundant user capacity.