CFAR performance analysis of a phase-coded pulse compression system with hard limiter

It is taken for granted in engineering that a phase-coded compression system with a hard limiter and an integrator possesses naturally of constant false alarm rate (CFAR). In this paper, however, it is shown by theoretical analysis that the CFAR can not generally be guaranteed for the system. In clutter environments, the CFAR feature of the system is violated due to the correlation of clutter residuals and can be recovered by additional decorrelating processing. The probability distribution of the sum of squares of a number of correlated Gaussian random variables is derived and a necessary and sufficient condition for the CFAR of the system is presented. This can serve as a guideline for radar engineering design. Simulation experiments support the analytical results.