Steerable Broadband Beamformer Design

The design formulation for fixed broadband beamformers can be extended to steerable broadband beamformers using a polynomial filter structure to achieve beam steering. The main advantage of a steerable broadband beamformer is that once its coefficients are designed, its main beam can still be steered dynamically without the need to redesign the beamformer weights. This feature is useful in applications where a desired signal source does not always remain fixed at a single spatial location, but is moving. These electronically steerable broadband beamformers allow the main beam to be beamed and locked onto the same signal source even if it moves to another spatial location.