Design & Development of Space Qualified Modular Receiver for Synthetic Aperture RADAR Payloads

This paper presents design and implementation of a compact and high gain receiver having modularity and hardware reconfigurability in the design architecture, to cater to space-borne Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) payloads operating in different frequency bands. The compactness and reconfigurability in the receiver are achieved by employing Monolithic Microwave Integrated Circuits (MMICs) for active circuits and Microwave Integrated Circuits (MICs) for passive circuits. The MMICs are packaged in standard metal ceramic packages, making the device footprint same for all the MMICs, thus adding modularity to the design. The measured gain and noise figure of Receiver configured for X-band SAR are 70dB and 4.65 dB respectively. The space worthiness of the proposed receiver is proven by successful completion of space qualification tests.