Application of GPU for missile-borne SAR raw signal simulation

Recently, the fast development of GPU (graphic processing unit) provides a novel efficient platform for SAR (synthetic aperture radar) raw echo signal simulation. Based on the platform, this paper presents an efficient raw echo signal simulation method for missile-borne SAR. In the method, scene data is firstly segmented into data blocks according to different areas in azimuth track. Then the simulation process is adopted to every data block with multithreading parallel program utilizing GPU, which significantly accelerates the raw echo signal simulation. The simulation result of multipoint targets for missile-borne SAR shows that the processing speed based on GPU is more than 20 times better than that on our test CPU.