A modern approach of a synthetic aperture radar processor and its technological aspects

A flexible hardware concept is presented which allows the handling of high speed image processing tasks. The concept is applied to a realtime synthetic aperature radar (SAR) processor covering C-band ERS-1 as well as X-band radar data. SAR principles, the SPECAN-algorithm which is made use of in the processor breadboard, some of the basic hardware processing modules, and performance data are described. The performance data show that high speed image processing can be implemented at low power consumption and small volume. Due to the universal concept, cost can also be kept down for this class of processing tasks.