FPGA-based Pre-processing Unit for Real-time Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) Imaging

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) is a powerful microwave remote sensing technique which is capable in producing high resolution images from the measurements of the earth surface independent of weather conditions. Range-Doppler algorithm (RDA) is commonly used for the processing of SAR data by massively utilizing Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) and Inverse Fast Fourier Transform (IFFT) operations. The implementation of radix-2 FFT in Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) is presented in this paper. This paper highlights the design and development of a FPGA-based pre-processing unit for real-time SAR imaging. Particularly, an efficient FFT processing module has been developed. The proposed architecture significantly reduced the hardware resources while achieving the reasonably high processing speed and throughput rate.