Real-time radar signal processing on Massively Parallel Processor Arrays

The next generation radar systems have high performance demands on the signal processing chain. Among these are advanced image creating sensor systems in which complex calculations are to be performed on huge sets of data in realtime. Massively Parallel Processor Arrays (MPPAs) are gaining attention to cope with the computational requirements of complex radar signal processing by exploiting the massive parallelism inherent in the algorithms in an energy efficient manner. In this paper, we evaluate two such massively parallel architectures, namely, Ambric and Epiphany, by implementing a significantly large case study of autofocus criterion calculation, which is a key component in future synthetic aperture radar systems. The implementation results from the two case studies are compared on the basis of achieved performance, energy efficiency, and programmability.