Columbia Technology Ventures

Direct space-to-information converter for efficient interference sensing

This technology is a reconfigurable and scalable architecture for efficient detection of direction-of-arrival of an interference signal.

Unmet Need: Reducing tradeoff in interference sensing due to the Nyquist sampling theorem

Current methods in direction-of-arrival (DOA) sensing rely on conventional delay-and-sum beamformers (CBFs). While CBF is widely used, it has significant drawbacks, namely scan time, resolution and energy consumption due to the Nyquist sampling theorem. Because detection of a signal requires the placement of several spatial antennas, relying on CBF will require many sum angles and intensive calculations. Thus, in a CBF system, sampling time and performance are tradeoffs when detecting the DOA of an interferer.

The Technology: Reconfigurable and scalable direct space-to-information converters for rapid DOA sensing

This technology is a direct space-to-information converter (DSIC) that unifies conventional beamformers (CBFs) with compressed sampling of DOA into a single reconfigurable and scalable receiver-array architecture. This technology reduces the number of scans required and has increased detection efficiencies compared to CBF. DSIC can rapidly find the DOA of a certain number of emitters by converting an incoming wavefront to spatial information. It then generates only a few compressed sensing measurements by forming random projections of the spatial signal consecutively in time. This technology has been shown to consume 16× less energy than a CBF. In addition, DSIC offers a wide-range of reconfigurability and scalability advantages when compared to CBF, especially when the number of interferers is unknown.

Applications:

  • Efficient direction-of-arrival sensing
  • Cellular communication or GPS interference mitigation
  • Vehicular radar systems (LIDAR)
  • Ultrasound imaging
  • Unmanned aerial vehicle detection

Advantages:

  • Reconfigurable and scalable architecture for signal detection and sensing
  • Faster and lower energy interference signal locating
  • Reduced overhead costs in performance and sampling time

Lab Director:

Peter Kinget, Ph.D.

Patent Information:

Patent Issued

Related Publications:

Tech Ventures Reference: