An FPGA architecture for velocity independent backprojection in FMCW-based SAR systems

Abstract

This paper introduces a new FPGA architecture optimized for Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW) Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR). The architecture implements a Global-Backprojection-Algorithm (GBP) which has been modified to be independent of platform velocity (start-stop-approximation). The design supports parallelism of dedicated GBP processing modules in order to provide high performance. Compared to a MATLAB implementation on a single core Intel i5 at 3.2 GHz the dedicated implementation on a ML605 board provides a minimum speed-up factor of 94. The entire FPGA system was tested with real-life SAR data.