A Fully Integrated K-band UWB Radar IC for Collision Avoidance of Drone and Small UAV

A fully integrated K-band UWB radar IC is presented. In order to increase the detection range, a pseudo coherent receiver architecture is adopted using the direct conversion scheme. The UWB transmitter is a carrier-based impulse generator and the proposed active switch for windowing the LO signal reduces the spectral leakage. Two cascaded DLLs provide the clocks and enable the high-resolution sampling of 200 ps. The radar receiver achieves a conversion gain of 79 dB, and a noise figure of 7.4 dB. The carrier frequency and bandwidth of UWB signal can be tunable in the range of 22.9 – 25.5 GHz and 0.18 – 5.2 GHz, respectively. The UWB radar IC is fabricated in a 65 nm CMOS process and consuming 179 mW from a single 1.2-V supply. The loop-back test is also demonstrated to verify and estimate the radar detection range for the given RCS area.