Digital array receiving channel performance measurement system

Abstract

Digital array radar (DAR) is an important tendency of phased array radar (PAR). Since the DAR is equipped with many transmitting and receiving channels, the effectiveness of digital beam-forming (DBF) is affected by the channel performance. Thus, it is important to test the channel performance and calibrate the possible channel mismatch of each digital T/R modules before assembling. In this paper, a CPCI interface based on the channel performance measurement is introduced. In the hardware design of the system, FPGA is employed as a core for data accusation and storage through optical interface. The CPCI chip is used as the interface between the data acquisition board and PC. Under the control of computer application programs, the collected data are transferred back to the computer, in which the waveform analysis in both time and frequency domain and the calculation of the channel performance metrics are performed. The test results show the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed design method.