SARDIMM: High-Speed Near-Memory Processing Architecture for Synthetic Aperture Radar Imaging

The range-Doppler algorithm (RDA), a key technique for generating synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images, offers high-resolution images but requires significant memory resources and involves complex signal processing. Moreover, the multitude of fast Fourier transform (FFT) and inverse fast Fourier transform (IFFT) operations in RDA necessitates high bandwidth and lacks data reuse, leading to bottlenecks. This paper introduces a synthetic aperture radar dual in-line memory module (SARDIMM), which executes RDA operations near memory via near-memory processing (NMP), thereby effectively reducing memory accesses, execution time, and energy consumption. The embedded NMP module in SARDIMM optionally supports a combination of FFT, IFFT, and matched filter operations of the RDA for range and azimuth compression. The operator within the NMP module accelerates the FFT by performing two radix-2 single butterfly operations in parallel. The NMP module was implemented and validated on a Xilinx UltraScale+ field-programmable gate array (FPGA) using Verilog-HDL. The acceleration performance of RDA for images of various sizes was evaluated through a simulator modified with gem5 and DRAMSim3 and achieved a 6.34–6.93× speedup and 41.9–48.2% energy savings.