A multiple SIMD mesh architecture for multi-channel radar processing

In modern and future radar applications there are high demands on the signal processing chain in terms of computational power and generality. At the same time, there are hard size and power consumption constraints. This paper reports on a project whose aim is to find a good scalable computer architecture that is flexible, programmable and as general-purpose as possible without too much performance loss. The proposed architecture consists of multiple SIMD computing modules, each based on a number of small mesh arrays. The modules are fully programmable and work globally as a MIMD machine and locally as SIMD machines. The data network is modular and provides both high bandwidth capacity and fast response. It has a fiber-optic stars topology, and employs time and wavelength division multiplexing, together with a medium access method specially developed for real-time systems. In this paper, we use a radar system with 64 processing channels to illustrate the algorithms and the usage of the processor modules. We show that it is possible to use a machine, consisting of small mesh processor arrays forming larger modules, with good efficiency. The building blocks show good balance between computational power and I/O bandwidth, and the SIMD approach seems good from algorithm-mapping point of view