A 320 MHz Digital Linear Frequency Modulated Signal Generator for Radar Applications Using FPGA Technology

This work proposes a realization for an improved system using a unique parallel processing technique and the approximation of the piecewise parabolic interpolation, to generate digital chirp signals with a bandwidth reaches up to 320 MHZ for the applications of radar and particularly Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR). In this work, a hardware implementation for a smart parallel processing technique with 4 threads is completely derived and achieved, this implementation is done by field programmable gate array (FPGA) technology, and exploited to increase the bandwidth of the generated chirp signals using a hybrid system based on direct digital frequency synthesizer with low cost and minimal hardware overhead, in addition to having a smaller ROM size with respect to the other existing techniques in the literature. The utilized implementation uses X5-TX platform with FPGA Xilinx Virtex5 SX95T with 512 MB DDR2 DRAM and 4MB QDR-II memory.