Development of simulation tools for harmonic radar systems and classification of electronic circuits

Harmonic radar is an electromagnetic propagating sensor on which a lot of research has been conducted in recent years, is usually used to detect man-made objects that has nonlinear characteristics. In this thesis, first a new circuit classification method is developed using the harmonic radar system, which has a different detection mechanism than traditional radar systems. The back propagation properties of electronic circuits at harmonic frequencies have been recorded with harmonic radar simulations and harmonic power curves of the circuits has been obtained. Feature space of the electronic circuits under test (ECUT) has been created and analysed with the proposed method then verified with a realistic simulation model. The harmonic response of the ECUTs has been achieved by superimposing multiple output nodes. With the collected data, statistical properties specific to circuits such as skewness, kurtosis and variance were calculated and classification was performed using the K-Nearest Neighbors (kNN) algorithm. In the second part of the thesis, a harmonic radar simulation tool that uses phase coded and linear frequency modulated (LFM) waveforms has been developed. It can also apply various radar algorithms such as pulse compression and pulse integration. With this simulation tool, the advantages and disadvantages of harmonic radar systems have been made visible, and the effects of the parameters used in radar design have been made observable. In the last part of the thesis, a characterization system has been developed for RF (Radio Frequency) electronic tag circuits that can be used during harmonic radar operation. Using this system, the effects of some electronic circuits on various radar waveforms have been studied. By examining the effects of distortions in radar waveforms on radar detection performance, methods to reduce these performance defects have been proposed. With the results obtained, it has been shown that different RF tags work more compatible with different radar waveforms.