Microsynthesis, radar simulator – case study

 

Radar is a complex technology and when working with short-range radar, as we do, special techniques need to be adopted to allow work to be carried out during the development phases. It is not practical to use live radar when working in the laboratory so we developed several tools to enable development of circuits and signal processing software through simulation. Our radar simulation tool was developed in-house specifically to meet our needs when working on a 24GHz radar project.

The simulator runs on a PC and allows us to generate raw radar signals to be fed into our hardware platform to test and develop our embedded signal processing software. Using the simulator, ideal target objects can be placed in the radar field of view at chosen locations. They can then be made less ideal through the addition of reflections, distortion and other noise on the signal, all of which is controllable through the PC. This has proved to be a very useful tool in that when working with actual radar, it is impossible to get ideal reflections from target objects and it is very difficult to measure the degree of reflected radar that is due to noise, re-reflection or other unpredictable factors.