An FPGA-based balanced and high-efficiency two-dimensional data access technology for real-time spaceborne SAR

Abstract

With the development of satellite load and very large scale integrated (VLSI) circuit technology, spaceborne real-time synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging systems have become a solution for rapid response to hazards. Through analyzing the algorithm pipeline flow as well as introducing the storage-computation model, a balanced and high-efficiency 2-D data access technology based on cross-mapping data storage method has been achieved to suit the large point processing for real-time spaceborne SAR system. A prototype based on NetFPGA-SUME board with Xilinx XC7VX690T is given to verify the performance of the proposed design. Taking Stripmap SAR imaging of 16384 * 16384 granularity raw data (5 m resolution, 25 km width) as an example, the imaging based on chirp scaling algorithm takes 6.63 s, which is better than some other real-time processing methods.