Design and Implementation of an Integrated Data Processing Unit with Range Matched Filtering for Lab Scale Synthetic Aperture Radar Sensor

The Indonesian National Research and Innovation Agency (BRIN) is currently developing a synthetic aperture radar sensor for a medium-altitude, long endurance aircraft platform for remote sensing applications. The first lab-scale version of the developed SAR system consists of three main parts: transmitter and receiver antennas, an RF subsystem, and a data processing module. The antennas are linearly polarized, and the RF uses a chirp pulsed wave with a 5.3 GHz center frequency and a 150 MHz bandwidth, aiming for 1 m spatial range resolution. The ADC module of the Data Acquisition Unit (DAU) sampled the received baseband IQ signal from the receiver module and saved the complex value into secondary storage, which was then transferred for offline processing. In this paper, we present the implementation of integration between the DAU and the Data Processing Unit (DPU) to optimize signal processing time. With the new design, the current data processing steps can be reduced so that the required time can also be shortened. This will be very useful, especially in field experiments. The design and implementation of a range-matched filtering module as a part of DPU are presented and tested with outdoor SAR experiment data.