Motorola Corporation

Steven Brian Leeland

Karl Eric Miller

Price Andrew D'Antonio

Curtis Alan Provance

Kenneth Joseph Doerr

A method and apparatus for steering beams modulated from a mobile platform in a manner that reduces overall platform payload processing, and therefore payload weight and power requirements. According to the present invention, a beam steering data calculator ( ) generates a table of beam steering data sets ( ), with each data set corresponding to a specific beam-pointing angle mapped to a corresponding cell on the surface of the earth. A data set that corresponds to a received downlink cell address ( ) is read out from the table and mapped to the downlink address, and an output angle of a modulated vehicle beam ( ) that transmits a data packet to the cell address is corrected to correspond to the beam-pointing angle of the read-out data set. The generated table of beam steering data sets ( ) is then re-used for an application-specific quantization time for mapping subsequently-received downlink addresses with beam steering data sets, thereby obviating the need to provide real-time updates of data sets on a packet transmit interval basis. In addition, the present invention is capable of compensating for numerous other causes of beam-pointing error, thereby improving overall beam-pointing accuracy.

Method and apparatus for steering mobile platform beams

A systolic array including chips having interface and timing and control circuitry and a plurality of processing elements. Each of the processing elements includes a floating-point serial processor and a plurality of data storage registers. The data storage registers in all of the elements communicate through a gridwork of data buses and all data registers and processing elements are programmed through a global bus. Software is simplified because algorithms are implemented directly in the new architecture.

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Scottsdale, AZ, United States of America

Steven Brian Leeland