An efficient FPGA-based implementation of UWB radar system for through-wall imaging

The work presented in this paper aims to develop a low-cost ultra-wideband (UWB) radar system that has the capability to image through the wall of a human target. The proposed radar system relies heavily on a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) platform. The Xilinx FPGA Kintex-7 (KC705) board is employed to integrate the main functionalities of the radar system, such as the generation and acquisition of a UWB signal. The generated signal is a monocycle signal, which has an ultra-wide bandwidth. Due to the UWB nature of this signal, the radar system achieves better penetration ability, as well as high imaging resolution. However, the major challenge of a UWB radar system lies in the stage of digitization, as it requires a high sampling rate analog-to-digital converter (ADC). In fact, such a chip is very expensive. Hence, to reach a high sampling resolution using a low-cost and low-speed ADC, an efficient sampling strategy is implemented. In contrast to other UWB sampling methods, which require a hardware delay line chip, the new sampling scheme depends only on the FPGA firmware to realize a combination of real-time and equivalent-time sampling, which provides better jitter performance. Finally, to demonstrate the imaging capability, experimental tests are conducted in an indoor environment while human targets are located in different places. The measurement results revealed that the proposed radar system has the ability to provide 2D images that accurately determine the location of the target.