Engineering Service  FMCW  Low Cost FMCW Processor

Low Cost FMCW Processor (FPGA-Actel+Pentium M) for 2D Radar Imaging

Description:
These powerful boards include all the required hardware and software to implement an imaging radar system devoted to sub soil investigation.

The reconstructed image can be up to 2 dimensions: x-axis (along the path coordinate) and depth-axis (radial coordinate).

To operate the unit has to be interconnected with a FMCWRadio Frequency transceiver with 3 coaxial cables (for the signals I, Q and VCO Modulation) and 1 digital cables (5 wires) to collect the position of the antenna along the x-axis.

The hardware is based on a low cost PC104 Pentium M board interfaced by EISA to a FPGA (Actel) board.

Features:
Up to 250 tracks per second. One track is 256 samples.

Applications:
Ground Probing Radar for sub soil search of utilities.

Hardware:
  • Processor: Pentium M, 2 GHz, 1 Gbyte RAM, 2 Gbyte Flash Disk, 2 USB, RS232, RS485, 100 Megabit Ethernet, SVGA, Audio In/Out. Operative system: real-time DOS
  • FPGA Actel APA75
  • Antenna interface: 1 Optical Encoder Inputs for x-axis
  • FMCW Transceiver interface: 2 ADC converters (64 Ksps 16 bits) to acquire the I and Q Intermediate Frequency signals, 1 DAC converter (64 Ksps 14 bits) to generate the VCO modulation signal
  • Cabinet: stainless steel

Software:
  • Analog signal processing of FMCW transceiver signals (I, Q, Sweep modulation): Band pass filtering, AGC, Synchronous sampling
  • Digital signal processing of FMCW: DC removal, Windowing and FFT
  • Encoder processing: acquisition and tagging of the radar frames with the x-axis location
  • Image processing: end user display