Millimeter-Wave Cost-Effective Phased-Array Radar with Orthogonally Located Linear Tx and Rx Arrays

This paper proposes a cost-effective phased-array radar with an extremely small number of antennas and reduced signal processing complexity compared with a conventional 2D phased-array radar. The key techniques to realize the feature are 1D linear Tx and Rx antenna arrays located orthogonally to each other and the combination of analog-beamforming Tx and digital-beamforming Rx. The effectiveness of the proposed phased-array radar was verified by simulation and 3D spatial profiling experiments. The experiments were performed using a 79GHz prototype radar system that we developed. A phase shifter which was robust against process/temperature variations and whose phase error was reduced to smaller than 2.0 degrees was designed, fabricated in 28nm CMOS process, and used for the analog-beamforming Tx of the prototype radar. A contactless vital sign monitoring system which tracks and continuously monitors the target person in the room was demonstrated using the prototype radar system.