Joint Stripmap/Spotlight Synthetic Aperture Radar enabled by Element-Level Digital Arrays

This paper presents a concept for a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) enabled by element-level digital arrays (EDAs). SARs with arrays which employ analog beamforming for azimuth processing gain are required to trade cross-range resolution for total swath. An EDA mitigates this trade through multiple receive beams, enabling simultaneous spotlight and stripmap SAR. An algorithm is presented along with a demonstration of the realized wide-swath and narrow cross-range resolution.