Implementation of the Digital Correlation Unit for Synthetic Aperture Interferometric Radiometer

A Ka-band two dimensional Synthetic Aperture Interferometric Radiometer (SAIR) called BHU-2D-U has been developed. The radiometer can obtain images in real-time benefiting from the adoption of the Digital Correlation Unit (DCU). The DCU requires a data acquisition module to digitalize the received analog signal and a correlation module to compute the visibility function samples. The design and implement of the DCU in BHU-2D-U will be presented in this paper. Based on the system requirements, the performance of the digital acquisition module in BHU-2D-U is discussed. For correlation module, a pipeline structure is proposed to improve the computational efficiency. A series of validation experiments have been conducted. Measurement results have proved that the performance of the DCU can meet the requirements of BHU-2D-U system.