Radar stimulation system employing i-q baseband signal processing in radar return generator

A radar stimulation system for use in generating a synthesized intermediate-frequency (IF) radar return waveform for a radar receiver of a pulse-compression radar system during simulation-based operation thereof, the radar stimulation system including a multi-channel radar return generator having multiple instances of channel circuitry for respective beam-forming channels of the pulse-compression radar system, each instance of channel circuitry being a complex digital signal processor including:

• down-conversion processing circuitry to apply down-conversion processing to a transmit IF pulse signal of the pulse-compression radar system to generate a transmit-side baseband I-Q signal having I-Q phasor signal samples with in-phase and quadrature components;
• a set of convolution processors to apply I-Q convolutional processing to the transmit-side baseband I-Q signal and synthesized net resultant vector (NRV) range traces to produce a return-side baseband I-Q signal, the synthesized net resultant vector (NRV) range traces representing a predetermined simulated radar scene, the convolutional processing including range-bin multiplexing of I-Q samples of the NRV range traces and I-Q finite-impulse-response (FIR) filtering using the I-Q phasor signal samples as filter coefficients;
• and
• up-conversion processing circuitry to apply up-conversion processing to the return-side baseband I-Q signal to produce the synthesized IF radar return waveform.