Data acquisition and signal processing on FMCW navigation radar system

Abstract

Data acquisition and Signal Processing is an important part of frequency modulated continuous wave (FMCW) radar system. In recent year P2ET-LIPI was developing FMCW navigation radar system in portable size. The main component of data acquisition for navigation radar is highspeed Analog to Digital Conversion (ADC) USB-2020 board and signal processing algorithm has been developed using Visual C# 2015 Community Edition. USB-2020 board has two channel ADC on board with 12 bits resolution and operated in a burst-io mode to get maximum sampling rate at 20 MS/s. A timing generator for synchronization between ADC and linear frequency modulation (LFM) chirp generator is developed using Complex Programmable Logic Device (CPLD) Max II series based on VHSIC hardware description language (VHDL). Signal processing unit consists of windowing function to reduce side- lobe suppression, Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) function to get range information and adaptive threshold using three algorithms of Constant False Alarm Rate (CFAR): Cell Averaging (CA), Order Statistic (OS) and Variable Index (VI) CFAR. The experiment shows that the data acquisition module can capture In-phase and Quadrature (I/Q) beat signal and signal processing algorithm can detect object/target from the noise.