FPGA-Accelerated Multispectral Ultra-High Resolution SAR-Imaging with Wideband FMCW Radars

An energy efficient stand-alone SAR-system based on the global backprojection algorithm using FPGA acceleration is presented. Three different radar sensors with very wide bandwidths operating at 80 GHz, 144 GHz and 240 GHz are simultaneously connected to the processor. A hardware accelerator is implemented using a systolic array architecture via high-level synthesis. As system platform, a Xilinx Zynq Ultrascale+ system on a chip (SoC) was used. A speedup of 177 was achieved with an optimized hardware architecture in comparison to a software solution running on the integrated ARM A53 quadcore. The system allows for measuring and focusing multiple high-resolution images in less than 20 seconds.