Project Overview
This is a second generation project on a SAR Imager; the sponsor being Northrop Grumman, along with our advisor Pete Stenger, and the Electrical and Computer Engineering team from the previous year did not get the imager to function fully, with signal generation and signal processing not being implemented on the board.
With the assistance of the FAMU-FSU College of Engineering and our project sponsor, Northrop Grumman, we will create a concealable, low-cost system with low resolution that implements electronic Radar design to detect metal at 16 different phase center from a distance of 20 ft. A signal processing algorithim will be developed and implemented on the FPGA board to do all signal processing on the board itself, while also creating a low resolution image that coorelates to energy peaks at the 16 different phase centers being targeted.
The electrical and computer engineering team on this project will be working on all aspects of coding with VHDL, the power supply, signal processing, RF propagation and all electronic components of the Synthetic Aperture Radar Imager. While the design of the SAR imager is still fairly small scale, considering it is still just a student project, on a larger scale with more expensive and effective components, some applications that this project can extend to would be metal detection without any mechanical parts, just scanning using principles of electromagnetic wave propagation and signal processing. Since this is a continuation project from a previous year, the goal of the ECE team this year is to improve and optimize the overall design and functionality of the imager. For example, one goal that must be achieved is making the FPGA board control all signal pulses and signal analysis. The mechanical engineers on the ECE led team of the project will be working not only as liaisons to the ECE team on what the mechanical led team would like to do and helping interpret that information for the electrical engineers to understand it better, but also will be improving the design on the component box, allowing it to hold the components more safely, while also improving ventilation in the box.
