Synthetic Aperture Radar Algorithms on Transport Triggered Architecture Processors using OpenCL

Abstract

Live SAR imaging from small UAVs is an emerging field. On-board processing of the radar data requires highperformance and energy-efficient platforms. One candidate for this are Transport Triggered Architecture (TTA) processors. We implement Backprojection and Backprojection Autofocus on a TTA processor specially adapted for this task using OpenCL. The resulting implementation is compared to other platforms in terms of energy efficiency. We find that the TTA is on-par with embedded GPUs and surpasses other OpenCL-based platforms. It is outperformed only by a dedicated FPGA implementation.