Improved design of a passive millimeter-wave synthetic aperture interferometric imager for indoor applications

A passive millimeter-wave imager prototype based on synthetic aperture interferometric radiometer (SAIR) technique is developing at Beihang University. It is designed for concealed contraband detection on human body in indoor environment at video imaging rate. The radiometric sensitivity requirements have been discussed in details, and the performance requirements of the digital processing subsystem have been analytically determined. A novel distributed digital correlator array architecture is proposed by using FPGA array, which results in reduction of hardware complexity and cost of the digital processing subsystem. In the proposed architecture, multistage pipeline technique is introduced for the reuse of logical resource that in turn results in decrease of transmission rate requirements for each FPGA, so that the feasibility of the digital processing subsystem can be greatly enhanced.