Application of AMD Versal™ Adaptive SoC to Radar Space Time Adaptive Processing in Space

Space Time Adaptive Processing (STAP) radar systems require rapid execution of complex matrix multiplications to calculate and apply covariances and adaptive filtering weights, to achieve filtering of ground clutter and to mitigate jamming. Developers of these systems require capabilities to rapidly simulate and prototype their designs. In this paper we discuss the signal processing requirements of a modern STAP radar system, and describe the implementation of a STAP design in two phases – firstly with a hardware-in-the-loop simulation using MATLAB^® and Simulink^® from MathWorks^® and an AMD Versal™ Adaptive SoC, and secondly with a full implementation in the AMD Versal Adaptive SoC, which is available as a radiation-tolerant space-grade device. Our two implementation phases make use of the Adaptive Intelligent Engines in the Versal architecture to achieve rapid execution of matrix multiplication with complex values and to allow rapid modification of algorithms, without incurring additional development time due to repeated place-and-route and static timing analysis cycles.