Architecture of a flexible on-board real-time SAR-processor

In compact airborne SAR systems on-board processing requires a programmable and compact Multi-DSP solution. At the Laboratorium fur Informationstechnologie (M), University of Hannover, a flexible Multi-DSP-Board has been developed. The architecture is based on the HiBRID-SoC, a programmable multi-core processor, optimized for SAR processing and image coding algorithms. Equiped with 6 HiBRID-SoOs a 233x175x15 mm board provides a realtime capability of processing SAR images with a raw data-rate of 50 MBit/s. Additional features are ROI support and image coding to reduce the required downlink bandwidth. The small volume and it's power consumption of less than 35 W enables it for on-board usage in air- or spaceborne systems. This paper presents the architecture of the system and explains how the different processing steps are mapped to the proposed hardware.