A Two-Chip Cascaded FMCW Radar For 2D Angle Estimation

Recently, radar sensors with four-dimensional (4D) high resolution are demanded for point cloud processing in automotive radar field. To achieve this goal, a large amount of transmit (TX) and receive (RX) channels are required for radar systems. Commonly, a monolithic microwave integrated circuits (MMIC) chip of an automotive radar has only 3 TX and 4 RX channels. The resolution is restricted by the limited number of transceiver (TRX) channels. Hence, in this paper, a compact and affordable two-chip cascaded frequency modulated continuous wave (FMCW) radar system is presented. Based on the multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) technology and sparse array method, the proposed module can provide an angular resolution of 3.8° in azimuth and 16° in elevation. In order to demonstrate the designed system performance, further measurement is implemented in microwave anechoic chamber. The measured results show good accordance to the simulations.