exponential delay generation in vhdl

I agree about the necessity of understanding the problem.

Dave, just a minor correctiion. You are discussing beamforming for a receiver. The said project is dealing with beamforming for a transmitter. Although the methods are closely related, the signal path is different. In this case one input signal is transformed to N output signals.

Besides understanding the theory, sketching a hardware scheme would be a useful step to proceed with the project. You imagine an analog input signal, so you need an ADC front end. To generate N phase shifted output signals, the system needs N DAC channels. Front- and back-end should be specified in terms of resolution, sampling rate and carrier frequency respectively frequency range.

To implement the delay/phase shift as a rotation in the complex plane as multiply with exp(j dphi), you need to transform the real input signal to an analytical (complex) signal, e.g. by a Hilbert transformation.

Frank