Anestis Terzis

Configurable RF receiver architectures

In the heterogeneous world of communication and radar systems, a steadily increasing number of technical approaches for different applications are observed. A new application on the horizon is the transmission of very high data rate streams (> 500 Mb/s) during a short time interval between moving clients. Such applications may be applicable to future intelligent traffic control systems based on R.D. Kuhne (2002) and will require the support of different standards for communication and radio location services. The high data rates require high bandwidths, which become available at millimeter wave frequencies. From an engineering point of view, we may not be unsatisfied with a growing number of tasks, however, economic aspects are forcing us to search for unified solutions that do not require reengineering for every new or modified application. Therefore, the goal is to shift functionality from hardware to software. For example, channel selection and demodulation can be implemented as software codes and are no longer hardware realizations. These software-defined radios (SDRs), which compute classical receiver functions, can be reconfigurable. Therefore, the need for hardware solutions that can handle several standards and related software implementations arises. It is the purpose of this article to compare two very promising solutions (sampling and six-port) with respect to their suitability in the millimeter-wave range and to discuss some related research aspects.

A robust 3D high precision radio location system

For the precise measurement of 3D object coordinates a high precision radio location system is introduced for 3D applications and optimized for very high precision. In different test scenarios the system is evaluated with regards to precision, resolution, reproducibility, and robustness. Based on a direct sequence spread spectrum transmission at 24 GHz the radio location system shows high robustness against interferers as well as a high suppression of reflections. After adequate object tracking using a Kalman filter it offers a very high precision with an uncertainty of 0.1 mm also in very general highly reflective indoor environment.

A high precision wideband local positioning system at 24GHz

A high precision local positioning system is presented for the automatic transfer of object coordinates into a virtual system. Based on a wideband spread spectrum concept at 24GHz and an advanced signal processing the local positioning system allows for a very high precision in the mm-range and a high resolution in the range of only few inches. This is true also in multi reflection scenarios and for fast moving objects to be positioned. The precision and resolution in dependence of the noise characteristics of the system components and the external noise are evaluated and demonstrated in measured examples of a real multi-reflection scenario

Virtual prototyping for efficient multi-core ECU development of driver assistance systems

In recent years, road vehicles have experienced an enormous increase in driver assistance systems such as traffic sign recognition, lane departure warning, and pedestrian detection. Cost-efficient development of electronic control units (ECUs) for these systems is a complex challenge. The demand for shortened time to market makes the development even more challenging and thus demands efficient design flows. This paper proposes a model-based design flow that permits simulation-based performance evaluation of multi-core ECUs for driver assistance systems in a pre-development stage. The approach is based on a system-level virtual prototype of a multi-core ECU and allows the evaluation of timing effects by mapping application tasks to different platforms. The results show that performance estimation of different parallel implementation candidates is possible with high accuracy even in a pre-development stage. By adapting the best-fitting parallelization strategy to the final ECU, a reduction in the time to market period is possible. Currently, the design flow is being evaluated by Daimler AG and is being applied to a pedestrian detection system. Results from this application illustrate the benefits of the proposed approach.