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This study investigated and compared the practical methods used for the efficient Field- Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) implementation of space-time adaptive processing (STAP). The most important part of calculating the STAP weights is the QR decomposition (QRD), which can be implemented using the modified Gram-Schmidt (MGS) algorithm. The results show that the method that uses QRD with less computational burden leads to a more effective implementation. Its structure was parameterised with the vector size to create a trade-off between the hardware and performance factors. For this purpose, QRD-MGS algorithm was first modified to increase the speed, and then the STAP weight vector was calculated. The implementation results show that decreasing the vector size decreases the resource utilisation, computational burden and the consumption power. While the computation time increases slightly, the updated rate of the STAP weights is maintained. For example, the STAP weights in a system with 6 antenna arr...

Space---time adaptive processing (STAP) has an enormous computational complexity which has confined its practical applications. In this paper, we present an implementation based on field programmable gate array (FPGA) for the most computationally intensive portion of STAP, which is the adaptive weights calculation. This involves solving a set of linear equations that uses the radar return data. In the proposed architecture, QR decomposition block is the most computationally part which is parameterized by vector size to create a trade-off between the hardware resources consumption and delay. To achieve an efficient and high-speed structure, the architecture is simulated and implemented in two cases: single-vector and multi-vector. Results show that the calculation time of weights in single-vector design is less than that of multi-vector case. The delay of weights for 6ý×ý8ý×ý120 data cube using vector size of 17 and the maximum clock frequency of 259 MHz is 139 μs, and GFLOPs/Watt is 3.89 for implementation on Arria 10 floating point FPGA. Therefore, the presented approach can realize the real-time requirement and floating point computation of the adaptive weights for STAP.

Space-Time Adaptive Processing (STAP) can harness the efficacy of interference and clutter significantly. Calculations of the STAP weights involve solving linear equations which require very intensive computations. In this paper, the QR decomposition (QRD) using the modified gram-schmidt (MGS) algorithm is parameterized with vector size to create a trade-off between the hardware resources utilization and computation time. To achieve an efficient floating point structure, the proposed architecture of QRD-MGS algorithm is simulated and implemented in two modes: single-vector and multi-vector. Results show that the multi-vector method can lead to a high-performance design with higher operating frequency, lower power consumption, and less resource utilization than the single-vector method. For example, Modelism simulations show that the decomposition of a [Formula: see text] matrix with vector size of 17 takes 7.86[Formula: see text][Formula: see text]s with the maximum clock frequency of 282[Formula: see text]MHz, for implementation on the Arria10 FPGA. In real STAP applications, the matrix sizes are too large to be fit on FPGAs and the update rate of the weights are high. Therefore, this method can fit any matrix in the contemporary FPGAs with an acceptable update rate.