At ESA, RAW data have always been considered as users product. We always made them available starting from ERS and we continue for S-1. THis is not the case for other missions. However, we never made available RAW decoding software.
We have supported and will continue supporting anyone who would like to develop a “decoder” and we fully support if this is made available in public domain.
My personal opinion is that people willing to process S-1 RAW data (or any other mission) needs to learn about the sensor specificities.
If you want to process S-1 TOPS data, you have to learn about S-1. Being able to decode the RAW data is part of the learning curve. I can witness it>
The issue you are encountering is related to the matlab TIFF support that doesn’t understand complex format pixels. The standard tiff library and also GDAL seem able to properly understand this data (including IDL+ENVI).
For example:
tiffinfo S1A_IW_RAW__0SDV_20140825T224532_20140825T224605_002102_00217A_7AF4.TIFF_0001.tiff
TIFF Directory at offset 0x8 (8)
Image Width: 19768 Image Length: 15510
Bits/Sample: 64
Sample Format: complex IEEE floating point
Compression Scheme: None
Photometric Interpretation: min-is-black
Samples/Pixel: 1
Rows/Strip: 1
Planar Configuration: single image plane