Monitoring Architecture for a 76-81GHz Radar Front End

This paper proposes architectures to comprehensively monitor the functionality of a 76-to-81GHz Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW) radar front end, for safety critical automotive applications. These on-chip monitors periodically measure critical performance parameters and internal voltages of the radar transmitters (TX), receivers (RX) and local oscillator (LO), to detect failures in the field. They are implemented as a combination of mm-wave, analog, digital and firmware components in a radar IC in 45nm CMOS technology.