A Memory-Efficient Hardware Architecture for a Pulse Doppler Radar Vehicle Detector

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a memory-efficient structure for a pulse Doppler radar in order to reduce the hardware's complexity. The conventional pulse Doppler radar is computed by fast frequency transform (FFT) of all range cells in order to extract the velocity of targets. We observed that this method requires a huge amount of memory to perform the FFT processes for all of the range cells. Therefore, instead of detecting the velocity of all range cells, the proposed architecture extracts the velocity of the targets by using the cells related to the moving targets. According to our simulations and experiments, the detection performance of this proposed architecture is 93.5% and the proposed structure can reduce the hardware's complexity by up to 66.2% compared with the conventional structure. © 2011 The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers.