Research And Implementation Of Extended Target Echo Simulation Technology For Digital Array Radar

With the development of radar signal processing technology and the improvement of hardware processing ability,many active phased array radars with larger array scale and wider processing bandwidth are appeared.The angular and range resolution of such radars are improved significantly.Traditional point-target and single-channel radar emulation systems are unable to meet the requirements of the testing demands anymore.Therefore,the multichannel extended target echo emulation system is urgently needed.In this paper,an arbitrary waveform extended target echo emulation system for digital array radar based on VPX bus architecture is developed.The main contents of the paper are as follows:Firstly,the scattering center model of extended target is established and its angle scintillating is analyzed.The scheme of one 96 channel extended target echo emulation system is also proposed.Then,the echo emulation system is developed,with the structure of multicore DSP TMS320C6678 and distributed Virtex-7 + Kintex-7 FPGA.By sampling the radar intermediate frequency transmitting signal,the emulation system can generate 96-channel intermediate frequency emulated signals,according to the configurations from the host computer.The emulated signal consists of extended target scattering echo,deception jamming and white Gaussian noise.The emulation system is composed of one high performance processing circuit and three high speed digital to analog converter(DAC)array circuits.The high performance processing circuit calculate parameters of echo signal,and also generate single channel target echo and jamming signals.Each high speed DAC array circuit generate 32-channel intermediate frequency emulated signals,according to the outputs of the high performance processing circuit.Finally,the FPGA and DSP software procedures are designed and implemented on the above echo emulation system platform.The preliminary test results shows that the echo emulation system can generate arbitrary waveform extended target echo signal and calculate relevant parameters accurately in real time,according to the configurations of the host computer.The echo emulation system can work as an intermediate frequency semi-physical simulation platform for digital array radar,or as an integrated radio-frequency semi-physical simulation system,when equipped with radio-frequency transmitter and transmitting antenna array.