Design of a Heterogeneous Simulation Platform for Spaceborne SAR Echo Signal Based on FPGA

Due to the high cost of actual data acquisition, the simulation of the original echo signal of spaceborne SAR is of great significance. With the increasing requirements of high resolution and wide swath, the number of simulation points for distributed scenes is huge and the echo simulation is time-consuming. To improve the simulation efficiency, a heterogeneous simulation platform architecture with a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) was proposed in this paper. The range frequency domain pulse coherence (RFPC) method is used as the basic simulation algorithm and the FPGA parallel calculation is used to improve the simulation efficiency. The platform adopts the joint design method of Verilog and C language and the method of software and hardware co-design. High-efficiency data transmission between the host computer and FPGA is realized in the way of Gigabit Ethernet optical communication. The communication overhead is much smaller than the saved computational overhead. The test results verify the effectiveness of the scheme.