Eliminating the impacts of flicker noise and DC offset in zero-IF architecture pulse compression radars

Flicker noise and dc offset have strong impacts on the performance of zero-IF receivers. In this paper, we propose a generalized approach to eliminate such impacts on zero-IF architecture pulse compression radars (PCRs). The conventional low-pass filter in a zero-IF receiver is replaced with a predefined filter (PDF) to filter out the dc and low-frequency components from the demodulated radar signal. Simulation and experimental results demonstrate that, based on the prior knowledge of the radar signal and the PDF, the performance degradation, due to the complete filtering of the low-frequency components, can be recovered through a newly deduced compensation equation. Our approach can be widely used in the implementation of highly integrated high-performance PCR systems in the future.