mm-Wave Radar Sensors for Roadside Infrastructure Enabling Autonomous Driving

Driven by the major trend in the automotive industry towards autonomously driving cars, many efforts focus on the development of advanced automotive radar sensors. However, an infrastructure supporting the self-driving is just as important. Hence, there are research considerations to apply mm-wave radar sensors alongside the highway to monitor the traffic in real time, detect possible dangerous situations (e.g. objects on traffic lanes) and adapt the speed of the cars to mitigate traffic jams. Since most vehicles use radar sensors operating at 77GHz (e.g. for adaptive cruise control), it makes sense to use another frequency band for lane monitoring along the road. The unlicensed ISM band at 122GHz seems to be a very interesting candidate for this application. Hence, in this talk we will discuss highly-integrated 122GHz FMCW radar sensors realized in BiCMOS HBT technology for the infrastructure application. We will address circuit design challenges to achieve a sufficient output power to have a sufficient outreach. Besides, we will discuss antenna design to achieve a sufficient coverage and address several system-level considerations.