FPGA Implementation of Control Unit for 3D Ground Penetrating Radar

In this article, an FPGA-based control unit for 3D ground penetrating radar (GPR) is proposed. The system composed of FPGA, programmable delay chip (PDC), clock buffer and so on. The control unit adjusts the acquisition parameters according to the commands issued by PC and then trigger the pulse generators and receivers. Equivalent time sampling method is used for this system with an equivalent sampling rate of up to 33.3 GSPS. The control unit support 9 Tx antennas and 8 Rx antennas with up to 16 channels. Experimental results show that the proposed control unit can correctly schedule the timing between the transmitters and receivers, and it can transfer received data to PC via Ethernet, demonstrating the effectiveness of the system.