Multi-Input Multi-output (MIMO) radar is an emerging technology that is attracting the attention of researchers for both civilian and military applications. Unlike a standard phased array radar, which transmits a phase shifted version of a single waveform, MIMO radars can transmit independent waveforms across each of its transmit antennas. Judicious choice of these waveforms results in improvement in target detection performance, improvement in angular estimation accuracy, and reduction in minimum detectable velocity. The work in this thesis is broadly divided into two categories.

In the first part, combining the advantages of MIMO array and software defined radar architecture, we present the design, implementation, and validation of a Software Defined MIMO radar test bed for distributed MIMO radar research. The micro radars discuss here are low power, small form factor radar systems that use high speed Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) and a custom designed RF Frontend operating at X-band (10.5 GHz). They can be used individually or more than one micro-SDRs can be synchronized for MIMO experimentation. Real world experimentation results to validate the functioning of the radar testbed is also presented.

Conventional radar systems, in order to achieve smaller range resolution transmit waveforms with several hundred megahertz or gigahertz bandwidth. Traditionally match filtering is used to recover the information content at the receiver. However, for implementing match filtering the Analog to Digital converter (ADC) must sample the received signal Nyquist rate which is at least twice the bandwidth of transmit signal. This puts a constraint on the maximum available bandwidth of a radar receiver. On the other hand, stretch processing which converts range estimation problem into frequency estimation problem. Even though this significantly reduces the sampling rate needed, the received signal is still bound by Nyquist constraint. To overcome this limitation in the second part of this thesis we present a novel compressive radar architecture featuring 16 S-band transmit and one receive channels that combine multitone linear frequency modulated waveform on transmit with the classical stretch processor and sub-Nyquist sampling on the receive. This system uses a linear combination of sinusoids to modulate a Linear Frequency Modulation (LFM) waveform at the transmitter with randomly selected center frequencies, coupled with standard stretch processing receiver structure. We present the design of the RF Frontend, digital back end, novel clock distribution architecture for synchronizing the RF Frontend and the digital backend. We also present muti-target experiment results to validate the radar test bed and recovery algorithm.