Reframing Fast-Chirp FMCW Transceivers for Future Automotive Radar: The pathway to higher resolution

Automotive radar is evolving, leveraging the strengths of fast-chirp frequency-modulated continuous-wave (FMCW) waveform for distance and velocity sensing. Building on universal adoption of FMCW waveforms, innovation at the circuit architecture level exploits millimeter-wave (mm-wave) and baseband processing strengths of nanometer (nm) CMOS processes to enable range and velocity performance scaling in the 76–81-GHz band (
Figure 1
). In combination with nm-scaled automotive qualified microprocessors, this evolution promotes sensor tailoring for short-, mid-, and long-range use cases and opens a pathway to high angular resolution and radar imaging with the use of multiple-input, multiple-output (MIMO) techniques and sensor cascading.