Bended Phased Array Radar Digital Beamforming Design And Implementation

Advantages of phased array radar beam in its flexibility to break many limitations of conventional radar, making single radar to complete multiple tactical tasks, such as tracking, search, etc., to form a multi-function phased array radar system. Due to the need for phased array radar carrier platform, conformal phased array came into being, not only solved the problem of phased array antenna placement, while improving the stealth performance of radar and carrier platform. However, changing the shape of the antenna makes conformal phased array different from the conventional regular geometric layout conformal phased array in beam forming performance. This paper made digital beam forming algorithm simulation analysis mainly for one kind of isolated bended surface conformal phased array. Then project development and implementation of digital beam forming algorithm were carried out on this array by analyzing the algorithm.Firstly, the digital beam forming process and the simulation results of the algorithm is discussed in this paper from basic planar phased array. And the form of a two-stage weighted method at large sizes phased array surface used in digital beam forming is discussed, as well as the methods of forming sum beam and differential beam. Through the gradual transformation of the plane arrays, bended plane array and isolated bended plan array is got, and each form had been simulated with sum beam and differential beam analysis, which gave the different effects due to the shape transformation of the phased array.According to the computation characteristics of digital beam forming, this paper designed the hardware platform. Through the analysis of the three aspects that the ability of the fiber optic receiver, signal processing capabilities and data throughput, the design requirements of the hardware platform were presented. According to the design requirements for proper processing chip selection, a FPGA and DSP-based hardware processing platform was outlined. With the main part in the design, such as the power, clock, etc., we got the hardware platform meeting the need of the digital beam forming as discussed herein.Finally, we developped the digital beam forming algorithm on the designed hardware platform and implementated it. Firstly, we designed the FPGA program system in the way of top-down approach, giving a reasonable, scalable system module connection method. Then the main parts in the design, such as digital beam forming computation, communication between FPGAs and link port communication, were designed in detail. When designing the digital beamforming computation, a highly parallel computing architecture based in part on the internal structure of FPGA was built, to ensure real-time computing. To solve the communication instability problems between FPGAs, after analyzing the timing carefully, using a delay compensation method, ensures the speed and transmission performance for the communication port. Based on the FPGA design features, this paper analyzed the internal module to optimize the internal layout of the modules so as to achieve more stable results. This paper designed a booting method for the DSP in this platform to overcome the shortcomings of traditional codecontain method and had better universality and ease of operation. Meanwhile reasonable DSP program system process was designed, simplifying sub-function module programming and subsequent expansion. Finally, every aspect of the system and the final results were simulated by software and tested online using some waveform test data, to verify the feasibility and correctness of the design.