Overview
The processing of data from high speed radars continues to be an important signal processing problem. Fortunately, the parallelism and reconfigurability offered by field-programmable gate arrays offers an opportunity to specialize the data processing implementation as needed. This opportunity is likely to grow as the logic capacity of FPGAs increases and the cost of FPGA devices is reduced.
In a series of projects, a series of integrated FPGA-based radar processing systems have been developed, tested. and deployed. These systems range from high-end 3 GSPS/s sampling rate radars which are appropriate for space applications to eight channel 100 MSPS/s systems which collect a broad spectrum of information. The use of FPGAs in radar systems and an analysis of their robustness has been evaluated in a series of projects. These systems include a weather radar processing system, a space-based environmental radar system, a radar which can analyze the movement of bodies of water.
This work has been funded by the National Science Foundation, NASA, and Raytheon Corporation