Raphael Hellinger

Development of a mid range automotive radar sensor for future driver assistance systems

Radar sensors are key components of modern driver assistance systems. The application of such systems in urban environments for safety applications is the primary goal of the project “Radar on Chip for Cars” (RoCC). Major outcomes of this project will be presented and discussed in this contribution. These outcomes include the specification of radar sensors for future driver assistance systems, radar concepts, and integration technologies for silicon-germanium (SiGe) MMICs, as well as the development and evaluation of a system demonstrator. A radar architecture utilizing planar antennas and highly integrated components will be proposed and discussed with respect to system specifications. The developed system demonstrator will be evaluated in terms of key parameters such as field of view, distance, and angular separability. Finally, as an outlook a new mid range radar (MRR) will be introduced incorporating several concepts and technologies developed in this project.

Time-Domain Spherical Near-Field Antenna Measurement System Employing a Switched Continuous-Wave Hardware Gating Technique

A time-domain spherical near-field antenna measurement system capable of gating out erroneous signal components, which arise due to multipath propagation in nonideal anechoic chambers, is presented. The developed hardware (HW) gating technique evaluates a switched sinusoidal signal, which is synthesized by an application-specific pulse generator and acquired by either a commercial real-time digitizing oscilloscope or an application-specific equivalent-time sampling receiver developed for this particular purpose. The low-cost measurement system has been optimized for acquisition speed, dynamic range, and resolution. Its operating frequency range covers 1.5-8 GHz, and it is applicable to antennas exhibiting a typical 3-dB bandwidth in excess of 400 MHz. Test measurements of an omnidirectional and a directional antenna, respectively, have been carried out to demonstrate the performance of the novel HW gating technique. It is shown that the HW gating technique can significantly improve the absolute average deviation of the erroneous 3-D far-field pattern.