Reconfigurable Waveform Synthesis Techniques for Synthetic Aperture Radar

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) is an active remote sensor. It utilises relative motion between an antenna and its target region, to synthesis a relatively long antenna, which can be further processed to achieve fine spatial. Pulsed Linear Frequency Modulation (LFM), or usually termed as chirp pulse, is the most commonly employed modulation scheme in SAR system. Several techniques to generate the chirp signal have been proposed over the past few decades. Generally, these techniques can be categorised into the analogue approach and the digital approach. Analogue waveform synthesis techniques are capable of generating high bandwidth signal, while digital waveform synthesis techniques allow the property of the digitally generated waveform (type of modulation, start and stop frequency, waveform output duration) be easily configurable by altering the firmware or its memory contents