Investigation of a joint I/Q demodulation/pulse compression scheme for radar applications

This paper investigates a cost effective approach to extract I/Q signal components at baseband. The approach benefits from the modulation within radar pulses to extract the components through pulse compression. A typical radar system employing coherent quadrature demodulation and pulse compression implements these two steps separately. When I/Q components are extracted at the RF or IF stage, high rate and costly ADCs are needed along with costly digital hardware. The joint I/Q demodulation/pulse compression approach investigated operates at baseband, reducing therefore digitization rate and cost of the associated digital hardware. Furthermore, since the demodulation is combined with pulse compression, the resulting architecture is less complex which is suitable for low cost, less demanding radar applications. The considered simulation scenarios that validate the efficiency of the proposed approach and the obtained results are presented and discussed.