HiPAR-DSP 16: A parallel DSP for onboard real-time processing of synthetic aperture radar data

The authors present the HiPAR-DSP 16, a parallel and programmable architecture which is adapted to the demands of SAR image processing. To provide a high FFT performance, the HiPAR-DSP 16 features an array of 16 parallel processing units. Efficient data exchange between the processing units can be done by a shared memory with concurrent access. The HiPAR-DSP 16 is able to perform a range compression of 2100 lines (4k complex samples) per second. Therefore the HiPAR-DSP is one of the enabling technologies for onboard real-time processing of SAR images.