A Real-time Radar Signals Acquisition System Based On FPGA

VTS is indispensable to navigation equipment in sailing. As an important part of VTS system, radar data processing device is the key equipment of radar signal processing, transmission and recording, and accurately digitalizing analog radar signals is the key technical link of this part. Therefore, accurately, fast digitalizing radar video signal, and constructing stable and reliable radar echo acquisition unit is a hot research direction in modern Radar Information Processing system.With the increasing demand of the radar echo acquisition faster, more reliable and accurate, this paper propose an implementation scheme that can samples radar echo signal at a sampling frequency as high as40MHz based on FPGA under the comprehensive consideration of the actual needs, developing periods and the technology accumulation. This design uses high-performance ADC conversion chip for fast digitalizing, takes into account the system’s versatility and scalability as well as the data transmission and the requirements of the terminal processing, combines with the advantages of high-speed data throughput of the PCI bus, this system makes communication with the computer by PCI bus, in this way, high-speed radar signal acquisition and transmission is realized.This system is divided into two parts, include hardware design and software design. As the aspect of hardware, this design discuses schemes and circuit realization of three modules, which include radar signal acquisition, data transmission,power and clock module. The signals of four-wire radar unit include video signal, prow signal, azimuth increment signal, trigger pulse signal are synchronous sampled and the digitized data is stored in computer in real time though PCI bus. About software, this part includes sequential logic control module and driver module. Logic control module provide timing sequence for the entire system and ensure the system running reliably, much attention has been paid to the logical control of the A/D conversion, data buffer, PCI interface. The driver module is based on windows operating system, we develop the driver of PCI card under WinDriver. In this paper, the design basis for the hardware circuit and system timing sequence are described in detail.