Design of a flexible high-performance real-time SAR signal processing system

Signal processing subsystem is the core of a radar system, the performance and the design cycle of which could directly influence the implementation of the whole system. Therefore, how to realize a high-performance flexible universal real-time SAR signal processing system is one of the main challenges nowadays. The paper proposes the design architecture and implementation of a high-performance real-time SAR signal processing system with the TI's latest multi-core DSP TMS320C6678 based on the VPX 3U standard. It shows the strong computation ability, stability, easy reconstruction and good adaptability to a variety of imaging algorithms. By the successful application cases of the multi-mode, multi-polarization, multi-resolution space-borne and airborne real-time SAR imaging systems, its flexibility and high-performance could be adequately proved. Moreover, our experiment result indicates that a SAR RD algorithm takes only 21.55s for a 0.2m*0.2m resolution 4GB(16K×32K complex points) image, achieving real-time performance.