Real-time experimental wireless testbed with digital beamforming at 300 GHz

Antenna arrays implementing beamforming are required in Terahertz (THz) communications to combat the very high propagation losses. In this paper, real-time THz wireless transmission with beamforming at a carrier frequency of 300 GHz is demonstrated for the first time using a single-carrier FPGA based modem and a uniform linear array with four antenna elements. Digital beamforming is implemented at the modem, which is a prototype based on a millimeter wave (mmWave) communication product. Moreover, suitable converter and signal conditioning boards as an interface to the THz frontends have been fabricated and utilized for the experimental setup. Apart from beamforming, THz specific imperfections of the transceivers as well as their impact on the communication performance have been experimentally explored.