A real-time SAR extended object simulator based on FPGA

In this paper, an FPGA based SAR extended object simulator is presented focused on backscattering coefficients computing. It is aimed to be used for hardware-in-the-loop SAR raw signal simulation with applications in UAV or other platforms SAR sensors test and assessment. This simulator is based on geometrical optics (GO) model and can work in real time. The GO algorithm is analyzed and implemented with multiple processing units in FPGA. Arithmetic units are optimized to decrease the FPGA resource cost. The design is implemented on a FPGA board and verified with initial test results.