Hardware/Software exploration for an anti-collision radar system

Anti-collision radars help prevent car accidents by detecting obstacles in front of vehicles equipped with such systems. This task traditionally relies on a correlator, which searches for similarities between an emitted and a received wave. Other modules can then use the information produced by the correlator to compute the distance and the relative speed between the moving vehicle and the obstacle. We implemented such a system using FPGAs. We used hardware blocks to implement the high demanding computing correlator and a soft-core processor to compute the distances and speeds. In order to improve the maximum detection distance reached by the correlation algorithm, we developed and tested a modified version of a Higher Order Statistics based algorithm. This work results in a detailed description of this new algorithm, its possible implementations and the corresponding FPGA synthesis results.