Development of multichannel real-time Hardware-in-the-Loop radar environment simulator for missile-borne Synthetic Aperture Radar

Abstract

Radar target/environment simulators are usually developed for testing and evaluating various radar systems. In this paper, we present a novel implementation of real-time radar environment simulator with four channels for missile-borne Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR). By using wideband Digital Radio Frequency Memory (DRFM) technique and parallel computing technique based on the Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA), the simulator can provide real-time computation capability for raw SAR echo signal generation of extended scenes with a very small computational delay, which is essential for the missile-borne radar Hardware-in-the-Loop (HIL) simulation. Based on the multichannel and multi-DRFM architecture, the simulator is able to simultaneously generate multichannel SAR echo signals together with jamming signals. Moreover, the simulator is highly scalable and reconfigurable, and is able to meet a various kinds of radar simulation requirements.