A hardware signal processing platform for sensor systems

A field programmable gate array-based computing platform for high-speed sensors such as short-range radars is presented. The circuit performs necessary A/D conversions, raw data stream compression and target detection, and constructs a message structure suitable for external displays. In the prototype, USB is the connecting path to a laptop computer. An elementary pulse radar is utilized as an application example. An application interest would be in collision avoidance systems. Observed data transfer rates with real radar input signals were 36 Mbytes/s when typical target detection algorithms were applied.