Design of a Four-Chip-Cascaded 80-GHz Single-Board 4D Millimeter-Wave Radar for Highway Traffic Surveillance

This work presents the design, implementation, and verification of a four-chip-cascaded 80-GHz single-board 4D millimeter-wave radar for highway traffic surveillance. This traffic sensor has totally 12 transmitting and 16 receiving channels by cascading 4 RF front-end chips each with 3 transmitting and 4 receiving channels. Due to the applied sparse antenna array technique, 113 out of 192 virtual channels can be effectively generated, which theoretically achieve angular separation each of ~ 0.6° on azimuth plane and ~ 1.4° on elevation plane. Measurement results in real highway traffic scenarios confirmed the functionality of the implemented radar sensor from system performance aspect. Two output modes each of point-cloud and tracking object worked stably both by static and dynamic targets detections.