Synthetic Aperture Radar on low power multi-core Digital Signal Processor

Commercial off-the-self (COTS) components have recently gained popularity in Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) applications. The compute capabilities of these devices have advanced to a level where real time processing of complex SAR algorithms have become feasible. In this paper, we focus on a low power multi-core Digital Signal Processor (DSP) from Texas Instruments Inc. and evaluate its capability for SAR signal processing. The specific DSP studied here is an eight-core device, codenamed TMS320C6678, that provides a peak performance of 128 GFLOPS (single precision) for only 10 watts. We describe how the basic SAR operations can be implemented efficiently in such a device. Our results indicate that a baseline SAR range-Doppler algorithm takes around 0.25 second for a 16 M (4K × 4K) image, achieving real-time performance.