FPGA Implementation of Moving Target Indicator Filter for FMCW Radar Data

This study examines several digital finite impulse response (FIR) filter approaches for moving target indication (MTI) employing short-range FMCW radar sensors. The FIR filters can filter out low doppler shift responses from undesirable stationary targets. A 77 GHz AWR1642 FMCW radar sensor and a DCA1000 data capture card are used to build a hardware configuration. A single data frame (samples $\times$ chirps) containing a target approaching the radar is been considered. The recorded radar is preserved in a 256x64 matrix of in-phase and quadrature-phase components, which is then processed using various digital filters. The radar provides insights into doppler characteristics for the observations. This study proposes designing and implementing a two-tap and a three-tap FIR filter-based MTI processing module to reduce static targets. The VLSI DSP pipelining approach is deployed to improve filter performance regarding critical path delay and throughput.