Synthetic aperture radar with backprojection: A scalable, platform independent architecture for exhaustive FPGA resource utilization

This paper introduces a resource-scalable FPGA architecture for backprojection-based stripmap SAR imaging. Low energy consumption and small system dimensions allow for both, ground-based and airborne SAR applications. The architecture is independent from a specific FPGA-based evaluation platform, as it is integrated on a single FPGA and requires only common external memory periphery. The degree of independence is increased further by encapsulating the developed architecture or BackProjection Module (BPM) in a framework that handles external periphery addressing. This allows the user to switch evaluation platforms without the need to adapt the BPM. Scalability is provided by the option for parallelization of the BPM, thereby any FPGA can be exhausted in terms of resource utilization. This way the trade-off between throughput capacities and resource-effort can be adjusted to choose an application suitable platform. The entire system was tested on a variety of emulation platforms at different parallelization levels.