Scalable esprit processor for direction-of-arrival estimation of frequency modulated continuous wave radar

Abstract

The estimation of signal parameters via rotational invariance techniques (ESPRIT) is an algorithm that uses the shift-invariant properties of the array antenna to estimate the direction-of-arrival (DOA) of signals received in the array antenna. Since the ESPRIT algorithm requires high-complexity operations such as covariance matrix and eigenvalue decomposition, a hardware processor must be implemented such that the DOA is estimated in real time. Additionally, the ESPRIT processor should support a scalable number of antenna configuration for DOA estimation in various applications because the performance of ESPRIT depends on the number of antennas. Therefore, we propose an ESPRIT processor that supports two to eight scalable antenna configuration. In addition, since the proposed ESPRIT processor is based on multiple invariances (MI) algorithm, it can achieve a much better performance than the existing ESPRIT processor. The execution time is reduced by simplifying the Jacobi method, which has the most significant computational complexity for calcu-lating eigenvalue decomposition (EVD) in ESPRIT. Moreover, the ESPRIT processor was designed using hardware description language (HDL), and an FPGA-based verification was performed. The proposed ESPRIT processor was implemented with 10,088 slice registers, 18,207 LUTs, and 80 DSPs, and the slice register, LUT, and DSP were reduced by up to 71.45%, 54.5%, and 68.38%, respectively, compared to the existing structure.