Multi-Channel Digital Beamforming Radar Platform

Context

The Microwaves and Radar Institute of the German Aerospace Centre (DLR) and the Institut für Technik der Informationsverarbeitung (ITIV) offer a master-thesis or internship. The goal of the work is to configure, validate and test the digital beamforming unit of an advanced multi-channel ground-based radar demonstrator. The digital unit consists of 3 Xilinx FPGAs to process the data sampled by a 32-channel ADC board. Two Xilinx RFSoC boards allow direct injecting of synthetic radar data into the main system.

The configuration allows for hardware-in-the-loop testing of the radar demonstrator including radar beam- forming algorithms such as SCan-On-ReceivE (SCORE), multi-SCORE, or staggered SAR.

• The work includes a selection of the following tasks:
• Test & Validation of the digital unit
• Implementation and Testing of beamforming algorithms
• Implementation of an SSD-Interface for increased data throughput
• Demonstration of advanced radar imaging techniques
• Implementation of a unified control solution radar demonstrator system

Targets

Students with an interest in FPGA and aerospace. This thesis is in collaboration with Prof. Marwan Younis from DLR.

Requirements

Experience with FPGAs and VHDL programming is essential. Basic understanding of signal processing and radar systems is highly recommended and can be further acquired during the master work.