A fully digital transmitting-receiving platform for MIMO radar waveform diversity experiment

Radio Frequency (RF) transmitting-receiving platforms play important foundational roles in radar, communication, and so on. In this thesis, based on the Radio Frequency System on Chip (RFSoC), we design and develop a fully digital transmitting-receiving platform for the Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) radar waveform diversity experiment. Firstly, the overall design is shown, and the implementation of each module, including multi-channel arbitrary waveform generation, multi-channel signal pre-processing, multi-channel synchronous, data forwarding and storage are elaborated in detail. Secondly, the RF signal quality evaluation methods are introduced, and the system RF performance is evaluated. The results indicate that its performance is good enough to meet radar requirements. Finally, by using a mutually orthogonal discrete frequency encoding waveform, the detection experiments for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) are conducted, which indicates that the target is observed clearly. It verifies the effectiveness of our platform and its applicability to MIMO mode. Compared to conventional radio platforms of radar, our platform possesses many advantages. Firstly, it bears arbitrary waveform ability, and each channel is entirely independent. Secondly, it not only supports narrow and wide bands but also its sampling rates can be switched according to the bandwidth. Last but not least, it facilitates data analysis and processing as a high-speed data forwarding and storage path is designed.