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Altera FPGA based FMCW Processor for 3D+V Radar Imaging
Description:
These powerful boards include all the required hardware and software to implement an imaging radar system.

The reconstructed images can have up to 4 dimensions: the three space coordinates and the radial velocity.

The acquired complex reflectivity of the scenery observed by the antenna can be rendered in polar coordinates (azimuth, elevation, range) or Cartesian coordinates (cross-range, down range, up-range).

The double modulation (up frequency sweep and down frequency sweep) is used to obtain two images for each frame and to extract the Doppler information (radial velocity of the scattering centers in the scenery).

FMCW Radar Processor


To operate the unit has to be interconnected with a FMCWRadio Frequency transceiver with 3 coaxial
cables (for the signals I, Q and VCO Modulation) and 2 digital cables (5 wires each) to collect the azimuth and elevation position of the antenna.

 

The hardware is based on a low cost PC104 processor board interfaced through Ethernet to an Altera STRATIX II board.
 

Features:
Up to 6000 tracks per second. One track is 16384 samples.

Applications:
Radar Imaging up to 4 dimensions.
Hardware:
  • Processor: Pentium IV, 3.2 GHz, 1 Gbyte RAM, 80 Gbyte Hard Disk assembled on anti-shock assembly, 4 USB, RS232, RS485, 2 Gigabit Ethernet, SVGA, Audio In/Out. Operative system: Windows XP.
  • FPGA Stratix II or IV, or Cyclone III (light processor)
  • Mechanical Antenna interface: 2 Optical Encoder Inputs for azimuth and elevation.
  • Electronic Antenna Interface.
  • FMCW Transceiver interface: 2 ADC converters (160 Msps 12 bits) to acquire the I and Q Intermediate Frequency signals, 1 DAC converters (160Msps 14 bits) to generate the VCO modulation signals and/or 1 Digital Modulation (DDS with PLL).
  • Cabinet: stainless steel.
  
Software:
  • Analog signal processing of FMCW transceiver signals (I, Q, Sweep modulation): Band pass filtering, AGC, Synchronous sampling.
  • Digital signal processing of FMCW: DC removal, Time Gating, Windowing, FFT, Power Spectra (dB), Scattering Center Detection.
  • 2-Axes Digital Controller: synchronous movement in azimuth and elevation (for 1D and 2D mechanical antennas.)
  • Holographic Pattern Generation and Synchronization for azimuth and elevation scanning (for 1D and 2D ERA antennas).
  • Info Tag: acquisition and tagging of the radar frames with the azimuth and elevation angles.
  • Image processing: Search of targets, Clusterizaztion, Doppler extraction, Tracking, End user display (PPI, B-Scope).
 
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