A new 3-GSPS 65-GOPS UHF digital radar receiver and its performance characteristics

A new UHF direct RF sampling digital radar receiver was developed for an airborne early warning application. The digital receiver samples the input directly at RF frequencies with an 8-bit 3 billion samples per second analog-to-digital converter and performs the down-conversion in the digital domain. In order to meet the computational throughput requirement associated with the high-speed digital down-conversion, a 65 billion operations per second full custom signal processor chip-set was developed using the bit-level systolic array architecture. The design considerations and the performance measurements of the prototype digital receiver and its subcomponents are presented.