Asynchronous compressive sensing in radar systems

In this paper we present an asynchronous compressive sensing front-end for radar systems. By using a continuous-time ternary encoding scheme (CT-TE), the amplitude variations on radar pulses are converted into timing information. The oversampling architecture mitigates the quantization error and improves time-delay estimation accuracy. The high data volume resulting from oversampling is reduced by using compressive sensing (CS) in the digital domain. Moreover, the high power consumption of randomization in an analog CS front-end is avoided in the proposed asynchronous scheme by using a part-time operation strategy in the most power demanding modules. Simulations show that the proposed scheme achieves a better range accuracy and probability of detection at sub-Nyquist rate compared to a conventional system that uses oversampling ADCs.