Real-time pulse compression radar waveform generation and digital matched filtering

Real-time digital implementation of radar waveform pulse compression and match filtering on FPGA platform is studied. In this work, different types of radar waveforms including phase coded, linear frequency (LFM) and non-linear frequency modulated (NLFM) signals are generated digitally in Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGA platform. Waveforms with different time bandwidth products are tested both in FPGA platform and computer. Digital matched filtering implementation procedure used in FPGA is presented and comparison of theoretical calculations and FPGA implementation results along with implementation resource utilization are presented. Results indicate that precise generation of real-time waveform matched filtering implementations deviate at most 1 dB on range sidelobe levels from theoretical results. Moreover adopted segmentation and parallel implementation of the received pulse both allows processing of divided pulses without SNR degradation and uses less FPGA resources in general compared to processing full PRI at once.