Design and Development of DSP Hardware Interfaces for Radar Altimeter

Abstract

Radar altimeters are used to measure accurate distance between the ground /object below it in all weather condition. They work on FMCW, FMICW, and Pulse-wave RF signals. The transmitted signal has to be accurately and instantly extracted by the system from the received signal; hence, it is mandatory to build a system with high SNR. To achieve good results, DSP algorithms have to be developed for FPGAs or micro-controllers. Accurate hardware selection and interfacing with the FPGA is also an important task. Later, the analog signal is converted into a digital form. The proposed project is to develop and design a well interfaced system according to the require- ments of the altimeter. The assigned project work involves designing and hardware prototyping of DSP Hardware for Radar Altimeter. ZedBoard and VIRTEX-6 FPGAs are selected for implementing DSP and hardware interfacing. For finalizing the interfacing scheme, detail study of whole system as well as systems compo- nent is done during the project.