Massive Parallel SAR Scene Simulator

ABSTRACT: Synthetic Aperture Radars (SAR) are critical to surveillance and weapons applications. Due to the complexity of such systems, adequate testing typically involves the need for active fight testing which is extremely expensive. There is a need to be able to generated a laboratory SAR simulation environment to provide system testing and optimization that can provide $Ms in test and evaluation cost savings. In order to address this problem, in Phase I of this contract Systems & Processes Engineering Corporation (SPEC) will leverage its expertise in the development of Digital RF Memory (DRFM) based scatterer generators to create a design for a highly innovative SAR Scene Simulator (SSG). SPEC"s FPGA/software defined architecture enables generation of thousands of complex RF scatterers, each with realistic motion, amplitude, range and Doppler. The capability developed with have applications in a variety of military and commercial weapons and communications test environments. BENEFIT: SSG capability will provide millions of dollars in test and evaluation cost savings in military systems requiring near real-time processing of scene coefficients, such as SAR scene generation for testing of RF weapon sensors in HITL, phased array radars, radar ground mapping and clutter data. Commercial applications for this technology include satellite image processing, phased array radars, ultrasound image processing, communications channel modeling, radar ground mapping, etc.