An Approach of Using General Purpose Graphics Processing Units in Modern Systems for Electronic Warfare

Abstract

Modern systems for electronic warfare, especially systems for electronic support based on fast scanning wideband direction finders, are usually designed to achieve high scanning speed in order to provide high probability of detection of signals of interest. To achieve high scanning speed two parameters are important: the first is instantaneous bandwidth of a receiver and the second is processing speed. By increasing instantaneous bandwidth of the receiver, it is possible to increase scanning speed. However, increasing of instantaneous bandwidth has a direct impact at amount of processing power to keep the same or to increase processing speed. In modern systems for electronic support, scanning speed depends on instantaneous bandwidth of the receiver, frequency resolution, implemented methods for estimation of direction of arrival and required preprocessing and processing power of hardware. The latest computer system architectures being developed by the computer industry offers more processing power in a smaller footprint. Parallel computing has been rejuvenated with the development of multicore technologies such as Multicore Processors, Multicore Digital Signal Processors and General Purpose Graphics Processing Units. In this paper an approach of using GPGPUs in the wideband fast scanning direction finder has been considered. Some of the obtained results are also presented.