Design of a High Speed Data Capture Device for a Coherent Radar Application

Abstract

Abstract : Anti-ship missiles (ASM) have long presented a serious threat to the safety and security of America's naval forces. Over the past 30 years, significant efforts have been made to develop reliable countermeasures to protect the fleet against a wide variety of ASM weaponry. Due to cost, weight, and size limitations, conventional radar-guided ASMs (RGASM) have employed non-coherent radar techniques, and thus countermeasures developed to date have been designed specifically to defeat non-coherent threats. Recently advances in miniaturization have enabled the design of coherent RGASMs, demanding the creation of a new breed of countermeasures. To enable the design of countermeasures to protect against coherent RGASMs, a variety of tools must first be constructed. Amount these is a coherent RGASM test bed to be used for monitoring the behavior of missiles as they are deployed against simulated targets in a laboratory environment. One component of this test bed consists of a high speed data capture device (HSCD) for capturing and recording real-time data as it moves through a RGASM's digital processing in order to analyze how the RGASM's decision making is affected by each countermeasure's behavior. This thesis outlines the design of an HSCD for interfacing directly to a RGASM to aid in accomplishing this task.