Some aspects of designing real-time digital correlators for noise radars

Real-time operation of a noise radar correlator requires massive processing power. At present, it can be provided at a reasonable cost only by FPGA devices. However, adopting this platform makes different aspects of the design important than in the case of microprocessor-based design. In particular, our efforts are directed towards minimizing device usage, rather than number of computations. Several options are reviewed in the paper with this purpose in mind.