Digital Modulation: A Breakthrough in Radar Enabling High Performance at Lowest Cost

Radar sensing is the performance and safety backbone for autonomous driving technologies because only radar is weather independent, enables simultaneously distance and speed measurements and can detect objects outside the optical field of view. Today frequency modulated continuous wave (FMCW) radar systems are widely used for industrial and automotive Radar sensors. Due to the nature of the modulation modern techniques to improve signal identification and improve interference robustness are extremely difficult to implement without any constrains on processing power and/or system update rate. The presentation will introduce Uhnder Radar solution, which offers unique digital modulation based on phase coded continuous wave signals (PMCW). This type of modulation already known from the communication sector offers high robustness against other radar users in combination with real (cdm) MIMO (Multiple Input Multiple Output) techniques. The presentation will focus on the enablement of a 5D radar (range, velocity, time in elevation-vertical and azimuth-horizontal) with high angular resolution. Various technical requirements such as will be addressed: high number of virtual receive channels (VRx); digital modulation with increased interference robustness; digital modulation enables cognitive sensing (adjustment accordingly to the environment); massive MIMO support; low power consumption; high transmitter output power in combination with low receiver noise figure; embedded processing with high speed hardware acceleration.