Development and potential of real-time FPGA frequency-based SAR image processing for short-range FMCW applications

Abstract

This paper presents the potential of standard frequency domain based SAR image generation techniques for real-time short-range FMCW applications. Exemplarily, a Range-Doppler algorithm is implemented in hardware and evaluated for a 80 GHz, 25 GHz bandwidth FMCW system. For implementation a hardware-in-the-loop framework is presented, capable of coupling high-level MATLAB code with different hardware evaluation environments. This allows for a gradual swap of time-critical signal processing tasks from software to hardware. The stepwise swap makes a precise analysis of discrete algorithmic stages possible, leading to an optimized hardware description. A dramatic increase of computation speed can be observed compared to time domain based image generation techniques.