Integrated system of mini-SAR real-time signal processing and data storage

Real-time signal processor and data storage system of radar are often large, weighty and high power consumption, which cannot satisfy the requirement of the miniature SAR system. To solve this issue, firstly, this paper analyzes system demands on the computational capability, the storage capacity and the I/O bandwidth. Then, the method that the real time signal processor and data storage system are integrated on one board is presented. A combination structure with a monolithic FPGA, a monolithic DSP, and CF card is presented to realize the function of the real-time signal processing and the data storage. Three approaches relative to the computational capability, I/O bandwidth and storage capacity are presented to meet the requirements of miniature SAR in this paper. In addition, for the issue of the abnormal response time in the data writing of the CF card, the data buffer of radar data during the response time is realized by the multiplexing of DDR3 SDRAM. Finally the function and performance of the integrated system are tested on the experimental Ku band FMCW SAR. The results show that the integrated system generates the imaging data with the range swath of 800 m in real time and stores the SAR data with the fastest rate over 100MB/s. In addition, the system has the weight of 700 gram, the power consumption less than 16 W.