Using Reconfigurable HW for High Dimensional CAF Computation

In modern radio location systems based on passive coherent location (PCL), one of the key problems is an efficient and accurate computation of the cross ambiguity function (CAF). This function is related to the direct signal and signals reflected from localized targets. CAF represent power spectral density distribution of the cross-correlation between direct and reflected signals. In this paper we present an attempt to implement (numerically effective and sufficiently accurate) the CAF computation accelerator on FPGA. The results show that this accelerator could be used to compute CAF in real-time in the future PCL systems. The presented design has been implemented in PC accelerator cards based both on Xilinx Virtex IV and Altera Stratix II devices. The presented contribution gives overall information about the algorithms, accelerator architecture design and achieved performance. The possibilities of the future enhancements are discussed.