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

Abstract

This paper proposes a technique for synthesizing 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 its complex mathematical model. The proposed technique employs the low computation Direct Digital Synthesis (DDS) approach to generate these complex sinusoid echoes. The proposed Synthetic Aperture Radar Echoes Synthesizer(SAR-ES)is capable of synthesizing SAR echoes accurately in real-time and was built in a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) platform. The system can be used as a testbed to validate and evaluate the performance of a real-time SAR processing algorithms/system prior to the actual flight mission. This could help in reducing the frequency of flight trials and to reduce the SAR system development risk especially for satellite-borne SAR system.