mmWave Automotive Radar and Antenna System Development Using AWR Software
5 www.cadence.com/go/awr
The RF transmitter in Figure 4 includes oscillators, mixers, amplifiers, and filters, whereas the gain, bandwidth, and carrier
frequency were specified based on the requirements of the system or actual hardware performance as provided by the RF design
team. Likewise, the RF receiver includes oscillators, mixers, amplifiers, and filters with gain, bandwidth, and carrier frequency
specified according to the system requirements. Co-simulation with Cadence AWR Microwave Office
®
circuit simulation software
is possible as the transceiver front-end design details become available. As will be discussed later, the interaction between the
transceiver electronics and a beamforming antenna array can be analyzed via circuit, system, and EM co-simulation.
Figure 4: RF transmitter block
To detect the moving object more effectively, MTD is used. The MTD is based on a high-performance signal processing
algorithm for PD radar. A bank of Doppler filters or FFT operators cover all possible expected target Doppler shifts and the
output of the MTD is used for the CFAR processing. In this particular example, measurements for detection rate, and CFAR are
provided.
The radar signal waveform must be measured in the time domain at the RX input. Since the target return signal is often
blocked by clutter, jamming, and noise, detection in the time domain is not possible and an MTD is used to perform the
Doppler and range detection in the frequency domain. In the MTD model, the data is grouped for corresponding target range
and Doppler frequency. Afterwards, a CFAR processor is used to set the decision threshold based on the required probabilities
of detection and false alarm, as shown in Figure 5.
Figure 5: Subcircuit defining TX and RX antennas, channel, and target with swept distance to radar
