Real-time digital matched filter for radar pulse compression

Digital processing of radar signals becomes more feasible by the advances in integrated circuit technology. A programmable matched filter for real-time compression of frequency modulated radar pulses, implemented with high speed LSI/MSI circuits is described. This matched filter, denoted as pulse compressor, forms part of an experimental radar system. The input signal consists of complex samples (2*12 bits) at a 10 MHz rate. The maximum pulse duration is 25 micro-seconds, which results in a time-bandwidth product of 250. The pulse compression is achieved through application of fast convolution with a transform size of 512 and a 50 percent overlap. The pulse compressor has a pipelined structure consisting of similar modules. The data is in 12 bit fixed point format and processing is done by integer arithmetic with block floating point scaling to avoid overflow. The internal data throughput rate is 20 MHz and more than 720 million multiplications per second are executed.