<p>Real-time system level implementations of complex Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) image reconstruction algorithms have always been challenging due to their data intensive characteristics. In this paper, we propose a basis vector transform based novel algorithm to alleviate the data intensity and a 3D-stacked logic in memory based hardware accelerator as the implementation platform. Experimental results indicate that this proposed algorithm/hardware co-optimized system can achieve an accuracy of 91 dB PSNR compared to a reference algorithm implemented in Matlab and energy efficiency of 72 GFLOPS/W for a 8k×8k SAR image reconstruction.</p