Micro FMCW SAR with High Resolution for Mini UAV

With the ever increasing applications of Mini unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), there is a high demand in smaller volume and lighter weight on board radar sensors. In this paper, a lightweight and miniaturized FMCW synthetic aperture radar (SAR) has been developed and demonstrated. Novel circuit architecture and high density integrated chips are employed in this SAR, and the system has made remarkable progress in terms of size, weight, power consumption. The radar operates in K band, producing a signal bandwidth of wider than 2 GHz, enabling the achievement of a range resolution of 7.5cm. In order to achieve compact design, the system is developed on a microwave multilayer PCB, and the performance is proved by experiments.