Design of multi-channel digital correlator in SAMR

Synthetic Aperture Microwave Radiometer (SAMR) can be carried on the satellite to realize the global large-scale measurement of ocean salinity and soil moisture. As a key component of SAMR, the multi-channel digital correlator has been introduced in this paper from three aspects: an improved method to implement multi-channel correlation, the correlator design and the test results of the correlator. The improved method which effectively reduces the FPGA resource utilization and system complexity is applied to the multi-channel digital correlator system which consists of three signal collectors and one signal processor. The design of multi-channel digital correlator can ensure the real-time signal sampling and processing of 144 ADC channels. The results demonstrate that the measurement accuracy of correlation coefficient can exceed 0.99. (paper)