Novel windowing technique realized in FPGA for radar system

To improve the weak target detection ability in radar applications a pulse compression is usually used that in the case linear FM modulation can improve the SNR. One drawback in here is that it can add the range side-lobes in reflectivity measurements. Using weighting window processing in time domain it is possible to decrease significantly the side-lobe level (SLL) and resolve small or low power targets those are masked by powerful ones. There are usually used the classical windows such as Hamming, Hanning, etc. in window processing. Additionally to classical ones in this paper we also use a novel class of windows based on atomic functions (AF) theory. For comparison of simulation and experimental results we applied the standard parameters, such as coefficient of amplification, maximum level of side-lobe, width of main lobe, etc. To implement the compression-windowing model on hardware level it has been employed FPGA. This work aims at demonstrating a reasonably flexible implementation of FM-linear signal, pulse compression and windowing employing FPGA's. Classical and novel AF window technique has been investigated to reduce the SLL taking into account the noise influence and increasing the detection ability of the small or weak targets in the imaging radar. Paper presents the experimental hardware results of windowing in pulse compression radar resolving several targets for rectangular, Hamming, Kaiser-Bessel, up (x), Ξ _n(x), Fup ₄ ²(x)·B ²(x), Fup ₄(x)·D ₃(x), Fup ₄(x)·D _3.5(x), Fup ₆ ²(x)·G ₂ ²(x), Fup ₆(x)·G ₃(x), Fup ₆ ²(x)·G ₃(x) functions windows. The windows created by use the atomic functions offer sufficiently better decreasing of the SLL in the case of noise presence and when we move away of the main lobe in comparison with classical windows.