Proceedings of ICSP 96

A High Speed Radar Data Acquisition and Processing System

Yulan Wang Souyong Shan Cailiang

Teachmg & Research Section of Signal Processing Air Force Radar Academy, Wuhan 430010, China

Abstract This paper presents a high speed radar data acquisition and processing system.The system can samples radar echo signal at a sampling frequency as high as 100 MHz. Cooperated with associated software, it can analyze and process sampled data at real time. The special features of the system include that the sampling frequency as high as 100 MHz can meet the requirements of various radar data processing. The high speed parallel processor in the system possess a block structure, so that the number of its signal processing boards can be increased or decreased according to the requirements of algorithms. Many advanced techniques in computer hardware and software are adopted in the system, such as imitating radar PPI display technique, azimuth and distance wavegates controlled sample technique,high I low speed sample automatic conversion technique, parallel memory interleaving technique, shared storage and page management techniques and so on. It can be properly used in sampling, storing and processing radar target echo signal and clutter signal, so as to establish a database of radar target echoes and clutters. Cooperated with radar target recognition software, the system may be considered as a radar target recognition
system.

1. Introduction
The high s p e d radar data acquisition and processing system is specially designed to sapmle radar echo signal at a high speed and process the data at real time while the radar antenna is tunring in all directions. The system consists; of a high speed data acquisition equipmenil, a high speed parallel processor, a microcomputer and a high resolution monitor ( as shown in Fig. 1 ) . The high speed data acquisition equipment can sample radar echo signal at a frequency as high as 100 MHz. It has two operational mode: The one is low speed sample mode, the sampling frequency is 3 MHz. the sampled data are provided for microcomputer to detect targets so as to imitate radar PPI display. The other is high speed sample mode, the sampling frequency can be selected from 100 MHz, 50 MHz. 25MHz according to the requirements, the high speed sample occurs only in the azimuth and distance wavegates, the sampled data are sent to microcomputer for storage to establish a database in future, it can also be provided to the high :speed parallel processor to implement the reall time data analysis and processing. The high speed parallel processor is made up of several digital signal processing boards with a same structure. It is used to perforni various complicated (digitalsignal processing algorithms.

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The host computer adopts a 586 or 486 microcomputer. its main tasks are to imitate radar PPI display on high resolution monitor, and make the data acquisition equipment and parallel processor work normally and orderly. The composition and operational principles of data acquisition equipment and parallel processor will be described in details in the following. At the same time, a brief flowchart of the control software in microcomputer will be mentioned too.
2. Design principles of data acquisition
e

speed data acquisition equipment consists of programmable amplifier, A/D converter, azimuth conversion circuit, cache, highnow speed sample automatic conversion circuit, azimuth and distance wavegates circuit, memory controlled circuit, sample clock generation circuit, and computer interface circuit etc ( as shown in Fig. 2 ) . The programmable amplifier has four-grade measurement range, their correspording voltage magnification is 1/10, 1/2,1 and 2 respectively, so that it can meet the requirements of A/D converter or input voltage range. The AID converter adopts the AD9012AQ 100 MHz encode rate ) to perform to digital conversion, which can meet irements of the system for the highest sample frequency. ache and associated control circuits main body of the high speed data acquisition equipment. Many advanced ques in computer hardware are opted in the design of these circuits. The storage technique is used to make the converter and microcomputer share the

cache, so that the A/D converter can write the converted data to cache directly d period of sample and the microcomputer can read the data from cache immediately by the end o sample. In order to interface a low f speed RAM with ed A/D converter, we adopt para memory inter~eaving technique, eight chips of HM428128 ( 128k 7011s ) are designed to work ~temately, uuder this condition, the total capacity of the memory becomes 128k x 8=1024 the write cycle of the memory 70/(8-1)=10 ns. it can meet the needs of the high speed sample of 100 MHz. In order save the memory space of t microcomputer, we adopt page ~ ~ a g e m e n t technique, the cache o 1 M is devided into f 16 pages, the microcomputer can Visit the cache according to the pages. The highllow speed sample a ~ o m a ~ i c conversion circuit is specially designed to satisfy two types of needs in data acqui~ition. The one is to detect targets and realize the imitating radar PPI display, which need low speed sample data. The other is to get characteristic of the echo wave of t ~ g e t s as much as possible, which obviously need hgh speed sample data. The azimuth and d generation circuit is used to the wavegaies, which raise the efficiency of high speed sample data. the control of the automatic conversi

uth signal into 12-bit

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digital signal, which will be sent to wavegates generation circuit to generate azimuth wavegate and to microcomputer to imitate radar PPI display. There are three kinds of signals brought into the high speed data acquisition equipment from radar. The first is radar echo signal, it pass through programmable amplifier and A/D converter, then it is converted into &bit digital signal and stored in cache. The microcomputer can read the sampled data from the cache. The second is the radar trigger signal, it is used to synchronize the conversion of high and low speed sample as well as the generation of the azimuth and distance wavegates. The third is analog azimuth signal, its function has been mentioned above.

word should be written into command register to hold up TMS32K25. At this time, program and data may be loaded into the program memory and data memory respectively. Thereafter a command word should be written into command register to start TMS32OC25 carry out the program. Now, the microcomputer can read status word from the status register in this board to judge whether it finish to execute the program or not. If the program is finished, the microcomputer should hold up the TMS32OC25 again and read the processing result from the data memory of the board.
4. A brief introductiooi to control software The functions of the control software in

3. Design principles of high speed parallel processor The high speed parallel processor is composed of several digital signal processing boards with the same structure. The number of the digital signal processing boards can be increased or decreased according to the requirements of algorithms ( refer to Fig. 3 ) . The composition of each digital signal processing board is shown in figure 4. It includes a TMS320C25, 64K x l6bit program memory, 64K x 16bit data memory, 40 MHz clock circuit, address register, command register, status register and interface circuit etc. If the microcomputer needs a certain signal processing board to carry out a program, the address code of the board should be firstly written into its address register to guarantee the effectiveness of the following reading and writing to this board. Then a command

microcomputer are: (1) to realize the imitating radar PPI display. (2) to control the conversion of the high/low speed sample. (3) to load programs of the high speed parallel processor. (4) to store and process the high speedly sampled data. (5) to display the result of processing . A brief flowchart of Ue control software is h shown in figure 5.

5. Conclusion The high speed radar dpta acquisitiuri and processing system is a hardware system specially designed for radar target recognition system. With the continuous improvment in practica,l use, it has been able to completely satisfy the requirements in high speed radar data acquisition and real time data processing, it can be widely used in acquisition and processing of radar signal as well as radar target recognition.

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FigsPc 2.

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