Hybrid techniques for real-time radar simulation

Abstract

This paper summarizes results of a study of the design and application of special-purpose computers for the simulation of air-to-ground radars. Specifically, the computers must generate information in real-time to simulate the display of a scanning radar in a vehicle flying at Mach 3 and arbitrary altitude. The radar can view 105 square miles of terrain per second with a resolution of 60 points per mile in range (five per microsecond). This paper describes a hybrid simulator that exploits both the redundancy in the terrain and the repetitiveness caused by the radar scan pattern. An overall design is presented that affords reductions of 103 in storage capacity and computation speed, compared with a straightforward digital approach for generation of topographic profiles from which the display is prepared. Details are presented of data formats and transfer schemes through the memory hierarchy, and of algorithms for the reconstruction of analog profiles from a digitally stored contour map.