Analysis on Spectral Regrowth of Bandwidth Expansion Module by Quadrature Modulation Error in Digital Chirp Generator

This paper presents an effective method to achieve the wideband waveform for high resolution SAR(Synthetic Aperture Radar) using the frequency multiplication technique. And also this paper analyzes the root causes for the spectral regrowth due to 3rd-order intermodulation in chirp bandwidth expansion scheme using quadrature modulator and frequency multipliers. The amplitude and phase imbalance requirement are defined based on the simulation results in terms of quadrature channel imbalance. This minimizes the degradation of range resolution, peak sidelobe ratio and integrated sidelobe ratio. The wideband chirp generator using the frequency multiplier and memory map scheme was manufactured and the compensation technique was presented to reduce the spectral regrowth of SAR waveform by minimizing the amplitude and phase imbalance. After I and Q channel imbalance adjustment, the carrier level reduces －28.7 dBm to －53.4 dBm. Chirp signal with 150 MHz bandwidth at S-band expands to 600 MHz bandwidth at X-band. The sidelobe levels are reduced by about 8 to 9 dB by compensating the amplitude balance between I and Q channels.