• Journal of Advanced Navigation Technology
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• v.21 no.6
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• pp.554-560
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• 2017

Accurate altimetry is required for the reliable flight control of drones or unmanned air vehicles (UAVs), and the radar altimeter is commonly used owing to its accuracy for the ground level. Due to the limitation for size, weight and power consumption, the frequency modulated continuous wave (FMCW) radar is appropriate for drone because it has lower complexity than that of pulse Doppler (PD) radar. Especially, fast-ramp FMCW radar, which transmits linear FM signal during very short period, is generally utilized, because it is robust for the ego-motion of drone. Therefore, we present the design and implementation results of the radar signal processor (RSP) for fast-ramp FMCW radar system. The proposed RSP was designed with Verilog-HDL and implemented with Altera Cyclone-IV FPGA device. Implementation results show that the proposed RSP includes 27,523 logic elements, 15,798 registers and memory of 138Kbits and can measure the altimeter at the rate of 100Hz with the operating frequency of 50MHz.