A Novel Real-Time Echo Separation Processing Architecture for Space–Time Waveform-Encoding SAR Based on Elevation Digital Beamforming

Abstract

Space–time waveform-encoding (STWE) SAR can receive echoes from multiple sub-swaths simultaneously with a single receive window. The echoes overlap each other in the time domain. To separate the echoes from different directions, traditional schemes adapt single-null steering techniques for digital receive beam patterns. However, the problems of spaceborne DBF-SAR, in practice, such as null extension loss, terrain undulation, elevation angle of arrival extension, and spaceborne antenna beam control, make the conventional scheme unable to effectively separate the echoes from different sub-swaths, which overlap each other in the time domain.A novel multi-null constrained echo separation scheme is proposed to overcome the shortcomings of the conventional scheme. The proposed algorithm can flexibly adjust the width of the notch to track the time-varying pulse extension angle with less resource consumption. Moreover, the hardware implementation details of the corresponding real-time processing architecture are discussed. The two-dimensional simulation results indicate that the proposed scheme can effectively improve the performance of echo separation. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by raw data processing instance of an X-band 16-channel DBF-SAR airborne system.