At the International Microwave Symposium (IMS) in Philadelphia Imec announced the development of the first radar chip with embedded antenna. The 140 GHz CMOS device, manufactured in a standard 28 nm node, is an important step in the development and manufacturing of radar-based sensors for sensitive application such as building security, remote health monitoring of patient breathing and heart rate and others.
Imec’s radar-on-chip. Source: Imec
“With our prototype radar, we have demonstrated all critical specs for radar technology in 28 nm standard CMOS technology,” said Wim Van Thillo, IoT program director at Imec. “We are well advanced in incorporating multiple antenna paths in our most recent generation solution, which will enable a fine angular resolution of 1.5cm in a complete MIMO radar form factor of only a few square centimeters."
"We expect this prototype in the lab by the end of 2018, at which point our partners can start building their application demonstrators. First applications are expected to be person detection and classification for smart buildings, remote car driver vital signs monitoring (as cars evolve towards self-driving vehicles), and gesture recognition for intuitive man-machine interactions. Plenty more innovations will be enabled by this technology, once app developers start working with it.”
The low-power device includes a two antennas, single-input single-output (SISO) radar transceiver chip, a frequency-modulated continuous phase-locked loop (FMCE PLL), ADCs and a Matlab chain.
Some specifications include:
- Antenna gain close to 3 dBi
- Effective isotropic radiated power (EIRP) that exceeds 9 dBn
- Receiver noise figure below 6.4 dB
- Total power consumption (receiver and transmitter) less than 500 mW
