Design and Implementation of an Integrated Energy-Harvesting Non-Coherent Control Architecture for Beam-Steering Systems

Abstract

Scaling phased–array beam–steering systems increases the complexity of distributing power, clock, and control signals to a large number of beam–steering elements. This thesis presents a wirelessly powered control architecture for phased–array beam–steering that combines Wireless Power Transfer (WPT) with non–coherent Amplitude–Shift Keying with Pulse–Width Modulation (ASK–PWM) communication to reduce the need for conventional wired power, clock, and control distribution. The proposed architecture uses a single–input interface to wirelessly deliver power and control information to distributed beam–steering control blocks. WPT is used to energize the control circuitry, while ASK–PWM enables recovery of data and clock signals from the same received signal without phase–locked loops or conventional SPI interfaces. A synthesizable digital frame router is developed to decode and distribute the received control information to multiple beam–steering elements. To support the proposed architecture, this work further develops an energy–harvesting ASK–PWM receiver, RF isolation and leakage–mitigation techniques for energy–harvesting circuits, a PCB–feasible skewed buffer for PWM decoding, and a slewed–comparator–based DAC architecture for control–voltage generation. The proposed architecture is implemented and experimentally evaluated through FR–4 PCB prototypes and a custom 130–nm CMOS integrated circuit. These hardware implementations demonstrated the operation and integration of the wireless power, communication, and beam–steering control functions. The resulting system is integrated with a phased–array antenna to experimentally demonstrate beam–steering. The experimental results demonstrated the feasibility of combining wireless power transfer and non–coherent ASK–PWM communication for distributed beam–steering control thus, reducing the dependence on conventional wired power, clock, and SPI control distribution.