Spatial methods for direction of arrival estimation and hardware implementation

In this thesis, spatial methods for direction of arrival estimation and it hardware implementation are discussed. Estimation of the direction of arrival (DOA) of signals are widely used in different fields such as radar, sonar, acoustics, astronomy, and communications technologies. Spatial spectrum focuses on researching the spatial characteristics of the signal and the direction of the source. It displays signal propagation across all directions to the receiver. Therefore, if the spatial range of the signal is detected, then DOA can be found. This technology is very essential in signal processing, and it has expanded rapidly in recent years in particular finding the DOA of multiple signal sources. In this context, many algorithms have been used and have made great accomplishments over the last few years. In this thesis, firstly, the Capon beamforming and conventional beamforming based on ULA arrangement are simulated in MATLAB. The effects of the number of sensors, the distance between sensors, the number of samples, and the effect of SNR value were examined. The high number of sensors, high SNR values and the high number of samples increased the resolution and accuracy, while the distance between the sensors was chosen more than half of the wavelength, which led to the prediction of false angles. So it is observed that it would be best to keep the spacing at half of the wavelength. After MATLAB simulations, conventional beamforming is implemented in VHDL which is a hardware description language. For the VHDL implementation, signed fixed point numbers are used. The DOA estimation is implemented in VHDL for ULA. According to the simulation results, the VHDL algorithm achieved the angle values with a small margin of error.