An FPGA based Real-Time Multi-Target Synthetic Aperture Radar Echoes Synthesizer

Abstract

This paper proposes a technique forsynthesizing multiple point target scatterer Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) echoesin real-time. Traditional approaches require high computation resources to calculate the complex SAR echoes due to itscomplex mathematicalmodel. The proposed technique employs the low computation Direct Digital Synthesis (DDS) approach to generate thesecomplex sinusoid echoes. The proposed Synthetic Aperture Radar EchoesSynthesizer(SAR-ES)is capable of synthesizing SAR echoes accurately in real-time and was builtin a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) platform. The systemcan be used as a testbed to validate and evaluate the performance of a real-time SAR processingalgorithms/system prior to the actual flight mission. This could help in reducingthefrequency of flight trials and toreducethe SAR system development risk especially for satellite-borne SAR system.

Keywords

• synthetic aperture radar (sar) echoes
• direct digital sythesis (dds)
• field programmable gate array (fpga)