Analog vs digital vs hybrid beamforming

Three Approaches to Steering Beams

Beamforming steers antenna energy toward intended users, and three distinct architectures exist to accomplish this task. Analog beamforming uses phase shifters to adjust each element's signal phase, creating a single steerable beam with simple and power-efficient hardware. Digital beamforming equips every antenna element with its own dedicated DAC and ADC, performing all beam calculations in baseband to form multiple independent beams simultaneously. Hybrid beamforming divides the array into subarrays, applying digital precoding across subarrays and analog phase shifting within each one.