High Performance Reconfigurable Radar Altimeter To Control Technology

Spaceborne radar altimeter can measure the sea surface height, significant wave height and sea surface wind, and it can also be used in fields of Geophysics, Oceanics, Ocean Climatology, sea ice monitor, and so on. Now, a new generation high precision altimeter (HiPAL) has improved both the precision and the resolution by combining traditional radar altimeter with the synthetic aperture technology. To measure different targets, there are two operation modes for HiPAL, which are SAR mode and low resolution mode. When the two modes alternate, the different timing sequences for the altimeter control unit are also exchanged, while other operations such as communication with satellite platform remains. So the reconfiguration technique is needed for the control unit of HiPAL. In the thesis, the reconfiguration technique based on FPGA is studied, and a preliminary design and experiment has been developed for the control unit of HiPAL.The study of the thesis involves the following aspects:(1) The dynamic reconfiguration is investigated for the design of HiPAL. Three kinds of dynamic partial reconfiguration methods are analyzed, and the module based partial reconfiguration is studied in detail.(2) The key techniques for the self reconfiguration, such as SOPC based on FPGA, EAPR flow, and the fusion between SOPC and EAPR, are studied.(3) A preliminary control unit based on self reconfiguration for HiPAL is designed, and this unit includes control logic, Macro Bus, and the software program. An experimental module is developed to verify the feasibility of the self reconfiguration for the HiPAL, and the results demonstrate that self reconfiguration can accomplish the task of new generation radar altimeter with high precision.