Beamforming of Multi-Channel Digital Radar System on System-on-Chip

Abstract

When speaking about radar systems, most people might straight away think about them being used for military operations but radar systems today are a part of everyday life. To deal with increasing amounts of data from larger antenna arrays while still having an agile system, FPGAs are a natural choice when dealing with high throughput applications as beamforming.

This project explores the capabilities of the Xilinx Versal VCK190 ACAP, combining FPGA with a SIMD processor architecture called AI Engine to perform digital beamforming on radar signals. We realised an implementation of a digital beamforming system on a Versal VCK190 and were able to run continuously achieving a throughput of up to 7.8 Msamples/s.