Development of embedded sar processing module for UAV and microsatellite applications

The design and development of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) is one of the focused research areas in Malaysia since early 2000s. The main objective of this research is to develop an all-weather instrument for earth resource monitoring. As per today, three SAR sensors have been developed, each operating at L-band (1.27 GHz), S-band (3.125 GHz) and C-band (5.3 GHz), respectively. Although each of these sensors has its own dedicated radio frequency (RF) subsystem, their digital SAR processing module is common across all operating frequencies. This paper presents the design and development of the embedded SAR processing module, which is suitable to be mounted on small UAV and/or micro-satellite platforms. Its unique features include compact size, light weight, and equipped with onboard processing capabilities.