Highly-miniaturized 2-channel mm-wave radar sensor with on-chip folded dipole antennas

This paper describes a miniaturized 2-channel system-on-chip radar sensor in a SiGe BiCMOS technology. It includes on-chip folded dipole antennas that utilize a localized backside etching technique with a novel selective etching approach that is able to improve the radiation efficiency and the mechanical stability of the chip. The transceiver is equipped with a 30-GHz VCO that is complemented with a frequency quadrupler to generate a 120-GHz carrier signal. The 2 transmit channels can be combined to increase the effective isotropic radiated power by 6 dB and to implement a SIMO radar. The transceiver also includes BPSK modulators as well as I/Q receivers and can be utilized to build a flexible MIMO radar using frequency-modulated continuous-wave with time and delta-sigma modulator-based frequency division multiplexing as well as pseudo-random noise radar techniques. Radar measurement using digital-beamforming method with 10-GHz modulation bandwidth was performed to show the applicabilty of the proposed system.