New-Tech Europe | March 2016 | Digital edition

Design of a Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) Simulator Using High-Frequency Software

National, Kfir Aberman, Professor & Yoav Chachamovitz, Student

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synthetic aperture radar (SAR), is a type of radar used

look at the architecture and design phases of the SAR simulator. It was necessary to include several key capabilities within the SAR simulator to ensure the project’s success. It had to contain a signal generator, an RF transmitter, an antenna, an RF receiver moving target detector (MTD), and links to third-party tools such as MATLAB (Figure 5) and LabVIEW. NI AWR Design Environment provided a solution for including these specifications without being too complex for the students to use successfully. By using the graphical architecture of the software, they were able to build independent blocks that were suitable for specific tasks. In addition, the software provides many built-in blocks that the students

MATLAB for signal processing, thereby significantly speeding up design time. The SAMPL Lab design focused on sub-Nyquist sampling of the received signal and full reconstruction of the image. The Design Project The students, supervised by Kfir Aberman and Prof. Yonina Eldar, created an SAR simulator (Figure 1) that could handle many targets on the surface and perform very quickly. They then used MATLAB to calculate the object shapes. The students used high-frequency design software, as shown in Figures 2, 3, and 4, for this SAR simulator research project. The software gave the students a simple yet accurate

to create two- and three-dimensional representations of an object. SAR uses the motion of the radar antenna over a targeted region to provide finer spatial resolution than is possible with conventional beam-scanning radars. The signal processing uses magnitude and phase of the received signals over successive pulses from elements of a synthetic aperture. The SAR is similar to a phased array radar, but contrary to the large number of parallel antenna elements used in a phased array, SAR uses one antenna in time-multiplex. Students at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology SAMPL Lab built an efficient, easy-to-use SAR simulator that could be connected to

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