Widely-separated MIMO radar array using CMOS UWB transceiver

Abstract

A radar measures the distance between the radar and targets. Multiple-radar arrays are used for two-dimensional location applications. The radar array with widely separated antennas finds the crossing of range circles for the target location. The multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) operation jointly processes the multiple signals from the multiple radar transceivers (TRXs) of the array to acquire improved radar parameters, such as a spatial resolution and diversity and target coverage. Synchronization among the radar TRXs is very important for the MIMO operation. A new MIMO ultra-wideband (UWB) radar is presented with a wireless synchronization method. Chapter 2 describes the UWB CMOS low-noise mixer. Low noise figure (NF) is required for a enough sensitivity with a minimum integration-number of echo signals. An UWB radar system should have a wide bandwidth to obtain high-range resolution using a pulse signal with a very short pulse width. The excessive power consumption from the multiple radar TRXs demands to decrease the power consumption of the radar TRX. There are trade-offs in the UWB radar receiver. Amplifying the pulse signal at the carrier frequency requires multiple stages of low noise amplifier (LNA) as a necessity. This multi-stage LNA with Q-load is suffered from the trade-offs. The merged LNA and mixer not only has the wide bandwidth but also decreases the power consumption. The noise sources of a mixer topology are reduced by a proposed bleeding path g m -boosting and a common-gate gm-boosting technique. These allow the minimum NF of 3.61 dB while consuming the DC power of 2.6 mW at a 1.5 V supply. The measurement results show a conversion gain of 9.15 dB, a P1dB of -13 dBm, and an RF bandwidth of 20 GHz-26 GHz. The circuit was fabricated in TSMC 0.13um one-poly eight-metal CMOS technology with a chip area of 0.68 × 1.07 mm2. In Chapter 3, Coherent UWB radar TRX is described. UWB radar TRX has a feature of high accuracy distance estimation for ...