Throughout this session, you’ll engage in a series of interactive online exercises designed to help you design, prototype, and test your own phased array systems. Key concepts such as beamforming, steering, and nulling will be covered in depth. By the end of the workshop, you will be equipped with practical skills and a deeper understanding of phased array design, ready to apply these techniques to your own projects.

Below is the outline for the workshop:

• Brief Introduction and overview of common phased array workflows and applications
• Hands-on exercises on MATLAB Online:
• Creating and importing antenna elements
• Rapid prototyping of antenna arrays
• Beamforming, nulling and steering
• Additional Resources for continued learning

Important Notes:

• Duration: 2 hours
• Participants will be working with MATLAB Online and will be given a complimentary license. A MathWorks account will be required to access MATLAB Online.

This guide was created with the help of AI, based on the presentation's transcript. Its goal is to give you useful context and background so you can get the most out of the session.

What this presentation is about and why it matters

This hands‑on workshop demonstrates how to design, prototype, and simulate phased‑array systems in MATLAB. It connects classic DSP concepts — sampling, filtering, and spectral shaping — to their spatial counterparts: element placement, array factors, and beam patterns. You will see practical flows for building an element, assembling arrays (URAs, ULAs), experimenting in the Sensor Array Analyzer app, computing beamforming weights (including MVDR-style optimization), and finally deploying a designed array into a terrain‑aware RF scenario using Antenna and Phased Array toolboxes.

Why it matters: phased arrays are foundational for modern radar, wireless (including 5G/massive MIMO), SATCOM, sonar, and acoustic arrays. For DSP engineers, learning phased‑array workflows unlocks spatial signal processing techniques that are direct analogs of familiar temporal operations. This workshop focuses on practical proficiency: rapid prototyping, visualization, weight export, and integrating arrays into realistic propagation scenarios — skills you can apply immediately to system design and simulation.

Who will benefit the most from this presentation

• DSP engineers and students who want to translate time‑domain filtering intuition into spatial beamforming.
• Engineers designing antenna arrays for communications, radar, or acoustic sensing who need rapid prototyping and simulation workflows.
• MATLAB users interested in the Phased Array System Toolbox, Antenna Toolbox, and Sensor Array Analyzer app — especially those who plan to move designs from concept to deployment or hardware targets (GPU/FPGA).
• Practitioners preparing to model interference scenarios, nulling strategies, or integrate arrays with terrain and propagation models.

What you need to know

This talk is accessible if you bring basic DSP and antenna knowledge. The key concepts to review beforehand so you can follow the demos quickly:

• Array geometry & element spacing: element positions (ULA, URA, conformal) determine the array factor. A critical practical rule is to avoid grating lobes by spacing elements at or below half a wavelength: for carrier wavelength \(\lambda\), choose spacing \(d\le\lambda/2\).
• Element pattern vs array factor: the total radiation pattern is the product (or combination) of the single‑element pattern and the array factor. Designing elements (isotropic, cosine, measured/custom) changes beam shape and sidelobes.
• Beamforming weights: weights (amplitude and phase) steer the main lobe and shape sidelobes. For narrowband signals phase shifts approximate time delays; for wideband you must use true time delays.
• Optimization and nulling: minimum variance (MVDR) and constrained optimization approaches compute weights that maximize gain in a desired direction while suppressing interferers and meeting sidelobe masks.
• Mutual coupling, quantization and subarrays: practical constraints — element coupling, finite phase‑shift quantization, and partitioning into subarrays — affect performance and must be considered during prototyping.
• MATLAB workflow highlights: the talk uses System objects (Phased Array System Toolbox), the Sensor Array Analyzer app for GUI design and export, Live Editor sections for iterative runs, and Antenna Toolbox Site Viewer for terrain/propagation visualization.

Glossary

• Phased array — An ensemble of antenna elements whose relative phases and amplitudes are controlled to form directional radiation/reception patterns without mechanical movement.
• Beamforming — Spatial filtering by applying complex weights to array elements to emphasize signals from certain directions and suppress others.
• Steering — Adjusting weights so the main lobe points to a desired angle (look direction).
• Nulling — Designing weights to create deep minima (nulls) in the array response toward interfering sources.
• Array factor — The portion of the array pattern determined solely by element positions and weights (separable from individual element radiation patterns).
• Element pattern — The radiation/directivity characteristic of a single antenna element (can be ideal, modeled, or measured).
• Grating lobe — Undesired repeat of the main lobe that appears when element spacing violates the spatial sampling limit (analogous to temporal aliasing).
• Sidelobe level (SLL) — Relative level of secondary lobes compared to the main lobe, often a design constraint.
• MVDR — Minimum Variance Distortionless Response beamformer: an optimization method that preserves gain in a desired direction while minimizing output power from interferers.
• Steering vector — The complex phase/amplitude response across array elements for a plane wave arriving from a given direction; used as a target in beamformer design.

Final note

This workshop balances conceptual clarity with hands‑on MATLAB workflows: from building and importing element patterns to app‑driven prototyping, optimization of beamforming weights, and deploying arrays into terrain‑based RF scenarios. The speakers keep explanations practical and demo‑oriented, which makes the session especially useful if you want to move quickly from idea to simulation. If you are comfortable with basic DSP and want to extend that intuition into spatial signal processing, this presentation is a thoughtful and well‑structured way to get productive with phased arrays in MATLAB.