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Qiuling Zhu, Christian Berger, E. L. Turner, Lawrence Pileggi and Franz Franchetti (Proc. International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), pp. 1557-1560, 2012)
Polar Format Synthetic Aperture Radar in Energy Efficient Application-Specific Logic-in-Memory
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Published paper (link to publisher)
Bibtex

In this paper we present a local interpolation-based variant of the well-known polar format algorithm used for synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image formation. We develop the algorithm to match the capabilities of the application-specific logic-in-memory processing paradigm, which off-loads lightweight computation directly into the SRAM and DRAM. Our proposed algorithm performs filtering, an image perspective transformation, and a local 2D interpolation and supports partial and low-resolution reconstruction. We implement our customized SAR grid interpolation logic-in-memory hardware in advanced 32nm silicon technology. Our high-level design tools allow to instantiate various optimized design choices to fit image processing and hardware needs of application designers. Our simulation results show that the logic-in-memory approach has the potential to enable substantial improvements in energy efficiency without sacrificing image quality.

Keywords:
Energy-efficient, Polar format, Synthetic aperture radar, Logic-in-memory