Parallel hardware implementation of RADAR electronics equipment for a LASER inspection system

An amplitude modulated laser radar has been developed by the Italian Agency for New Technologies, Energy and the Environment for periodic in-vessel inspection in large fusion machines (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor). The system is able to obtain a complete three-dimensional mapping of the in-vessel surface. A first digital signal processing system was developed to modulate the laser beam and to detect both the amplitude of the backscattered light and the phase difference between it and the modulation signal. This system is based on commercial digital receiver and parallel digital signal processing boards on a VME bus. It reaches a speed of 100 K measures/s, showing good accuracy and stability. Starting from this, a further development has been done to increase the speed up to 2.328 M measures/s. Reaching the submicrosecond speed was necessary to implement the mathematical algorithm in a highly parallel hardware architecture using a field programmable gate array (FPGA). Based on the good results of the previously developed system, it was decided to maintain the same acquisition front-end though using the last release of analog-to-digital converters, to increase the operating frequency from 80 up to 200 MHz. The software algorithm previously used was completely redesigned and optimized to be used in the FPGA hardware architecture.