FIBERTEK, INC. — Department of Defense SBIR Phase I: AF182-108

Description

Synthetic Aperture LIDAR (SAL) and Synthetic Aperture RADAR (SAR) are complimentary sensing technologies that enable long-range imaging and target identification beyond the diffraction limit at optical and radio frequencies, respectively. Processing SAL and SAR requires high-speed digitizers with substantial data volume associated with phase tracking and aperture synthesis sampling requirements. Operational systems require a highly-integrated, low-SWAP multi-sensor processing solution with scalable storage to support SAL/SAR ISR solutions on UAV and/or other low-SWAP platforms. On the proposed effort, Fibertek will design a low-SWAP SAL/SAR processor leveraging previous demonstrations of multi-channel high-speed digitizing lidar, and incorporating advancements in commercial processing technologies. The proposed design will be capable of continuous storage of 2 hrs of fast-time processed data, with expandability for more storage capacity. Phase 1 work is focused on requirements analysis, design of electronics and data processing hardware, and analysis of system performance.