Waveform design principles for automotive radar systems

This paper presents a high performance 77 GHz FMCW radar sensor for automotive applications. Powerful automotive radar systems are currently under development for various applications. Radar sensor based comfort systems like Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) are already available on the market. The main objective from a radar sensor point of view is to detect all targets inside the observation area and estimate target range and relative velocity simultaneously with a high update rate. FMCW radar sensors have the advantages of very high range resolution but a serious task occurs in multiple target situations to suppress so-called ghost targets. In classical FMCW waveforms this has been solved in using multiple chirp signals with different slope. But in this case a long measurement time (approximately 50 ms) is needed which is a contradiction to a high update rate. Therefore, in this paper a new waveform design is presented which has all advantages of FMCW radars but needs an extremely low measurement time (10 ms) in a radar sensor with 3 different antenna beams.