Research on Digital Complex-Correlator of Synthetic Aperture Radiometer: theory and simulation result

A new digital correlator fur an airborne synthetic aperture radiometer was designed in order to replace the conventional analog correlator unit which will become very complicated while the number of channels is increasing. The digital correlator uses digital IQ demodulator instead of the intermediate frequency (IF) phase shifter to make the correlation processing performed digitally at base band instead of analogly at IF. This technique has been applied to the digital receiver in softradio. The down-converted IF signals from each pair of receiver channels become low rate base-band digital signals after under-sampled, Digitally Down-Converted (DDC), decimated and filtered by FIR filters. The digital signals are further processed by two digital multipliers (complex correlation), the products are integrated by the integrators and finally the outputs from the integrators compose of the real part and the imaginary part of a sample of the visibility function. This design is tested by comparing the results from digital correlators and that from analog correlators. They are agreed with each other very well. Due to the fact that the digital correlators are realized with the help of Analog-Digital Converter (ADC) chips and the FPGA technology, the realized volume, mass, power consumption and complexity turned out to be greatly reduced compared with that of the analog correlators. Simulations show that the resolution of ADC has an influence on the synthesized antenna patterns, but this can be neglected if more than 2bit is used.