A Multi-channel Radar Signal Process System
XU Chengfa
a
, WANG Junling
b
WU Ronggang
c
Dept. of Electronic Engineering of Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing 100081, P.R.China
a
bitfengyun@bit.edu.cn,
b
mailwjl@bit.edu.cn,
c
wurgang@bit.edu.cn
Keywords: radar signal processing; embedded system; array radar; multiple channels
Abstract. In order to meet multi-channel, high data rate, intensive computing capacity of modern
radar signal processing, a standard, scalable, high-performance general-purpose radar signal
processing system platform is proposed. The main processor of this system platform is the DSP and
FPGA. In the analysis of different kinds of radar signal processing algorithm, and taking into account
the respective advantages and disadvantages of DSP and FPGA, In this paper, a software architecture
method for radar signal processing is given to
deci
de how to distribute different algorithm into DSP
and FPGA. At last, for a certain type of circular array radar, an implementation of radar signal
processing by using the general-purpose radar signal processing system platform is proposed.
1. Introduction
With the increasing demands of radar detection power, precision and resolution, the requirement of
radar signal processing system with high performance processing capacity becomes more urgent than
ever before. Wideband radar can improve the ranging precision and resolution, but it lead to high
sampling data rate. Array radar, as one of those promising trends of radar, get better detecting range as
well as the improvements of the angle-measuring accuracy and resolution, benefiting from the
synthetic aperture of those multi-antenna elements, but with more serious computing load on the
signal processor of the radar system as a cost, for we need process multi-channel signals
simultaneously.
We could deduce that the advanced radar signal processing system should process the
multi-channel signal with high data rate. The hardware platform of the radar system should have
extraordinary high and parallel computing ability with huge data throughput and storage capacity,
while the software should have the characteristics of standard, universalized, extensible and easier
maintenance[1,2].
Aiming at the needs of modern radar system development, this paper proposed a hardware
platform based on DSP and FPGA with the corresponding soft-ware architecture. The reliability and
effectiveness of this platform is verified through the implementation scheme of a certain circular array
radar..
2. Processor
At present, FPGA and DSP are widely used as the digital signal processor in radar system.
Previously, as the coprocessor of the DSP,FPGA is mainly used to implement the pre- processing of
the data, but now with the development of the technology, the newly existing of the FPGAs which
have ultra-large-scale, high performance and low power consumption make the FPGA be fully
capable of completing some signal processing tasks independently. Compared to the DSP,FPGA’
s greatest feature is that it has lots of multipliers, so its ability of parallel processing is powerful, but
its drawback is also obvious, such as long development cycle and difficult debugging[3]. DSP which
is based on serial pipelined computation can not competent in the case of intensive computation, but it
is easier to program and debug than FPGA[4].
Considering both the advantage and limitation of these two processors, it is better to make use of
the FPGA to implement some structured and intensive algorithms such as Fast Fourier
Transformation(FFT),Pulse Compression and Digital Beam Forming(DBF) to bring its parallel
Applied Mechanics and Materials Vols. 20-23 (2010) pp 884-888
Online available since 2010/Jan/12 at www.scientific.net
© (2010) Trans Tech Publications, Switzerland
doi:10.4028/www.scientific.net/AMM.20-23.884
All rights reserved. No part of contents of this paper may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without the written permission of TTP,
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