Development on a Broadband Signal Processing Unit for Application of Small Millimeter Wave Tracking Radar

This paper summarizes the design and implementation of a broadband signal processor unit to be applied to a small millimeter wave tracking radar. Small millimeter wave tracking radars are based on emitting millimeter waves toward a target and analyzing the returning received signal. The signal processing unit in this paper is designed to process a broadband input signal with an specific center frequency above 100MHz and specific bandwidth in real time by configuring three input channels. At this time, a digital receiver was designed to process broadband input signals. The digital receiver uses a high performance ADC capable of high speed sampling, and DDC(Digital Down Converter) is configured using FPGA, and preprocessing functions include various functions such as DDS(Direct Digital Synthesizer), FIR(Finite Impulse Response) Filter, and Decimation. In addition, FFT(Fast Fourier Transform) and data type conversion processing were applied to reduce the processor load in the post processing stage. The preprocessed three channel large capacity data is delivered to the processor through high speed communication, and a high performance multi core processor and external memory are applied to process it in real time. In addition, an external communication interface was designed to control the entire radar system, and the power supply unit was designed to provide stable power supply. Afterwards, a performance test was conducted to verify the implemented signal processor. Receiving dynamic range and frequency error measurement tests were conducted, and all test met the required. Through this, it was found to be suitable for application of small millimeter wave tracking rader.