A multi-beam Scan Mode Synthetic Aperture Radar processor suitable for satellite operation

As FPGA device sizes increase, they offer greater opportunities for on-site data processing, which is potentially useful for reducing the transmission requirements for applications with large data sets. For satellite applications, unlike ASICs, designers also benefit from an FPGA's ability to be reprogrammed to update functionality over the lifetime of a satellite (15+ years) and a mission (often 5+ years), while having significantly lower power costs than GPGPUs or high performance processors. This paper presents the first custom, fully pipelined, adaptable framework for multi-beam Scan Mode Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), the only 24/7 remote sensing imaging system that is capable of producing high-resolution global images in any weather conditions. As high resolution SAR or even low-resolution global-coverage generates on the order of hundreds of Megabytes of raw data per second, onboard SAR processing would reduce this transmitted data by orders of magnitude. Our Scan-mode SAR processor is scalable to different bit-widths and frame-sizes. We are able to process 81×730 frames of 8-bit I-Q channels from each scan (1.4 MB) in less than 1.5 ms, approximately 102 times faster than a corresponding estimated C solution leveraging the Intel Integrated Performance Primitives, and 150 times faster than the corresponding fully vectorized software solution run in MATLAB (6-core, 3.5 Ghz CPU).