Investigations of Multi-Beam SCORE Datarates

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) instruments equipped with multi-channel capabilities allows the application of digital beam forming techniques facilitating high resolution and wide swath imaging. Moving the digital interface close to the antenna comes at the expense of increased and more complex digital processing. This paper details the on-board data processing steps providing closed expressions for the data rates, memory utilisation and computational complexity. The reference system is taken to be a radar ground demonstrator based on a reflector with a 32-channel feed array followed by a 3-FPGA digital processing unit. Simulations show that the necessary computational performance can be achieved, although memory constraints remain critical.