mmWave Automotive Radar and Antenna System Development Using AWR Software
8 www.cadence.com/go/awr
To determine the physical attributes that will yield the desired electrical response, antenna designers can use the Cadence AWR
AntSyn™ antenna synthesis and optimization module. AntSyn software enables users to specify the electrical requirements and
physical size constraints of the antenna and the software explores a set of design configurations and determines the optimal
structure based on proprietary genetic optimization and EM analysis. The resulting antenna geometry can then be imported in a
dedicated planar or 3D EM solver such as AWR AXIEM or Analyst simulators for verification or further analysis/optimization.
Planar elements can easily form array structures by combining very simple elements such as microstrip patches. Patches can
be configured in a series such as the 1x8 patch array in Figure 10, where each element is connected serially by a "tunable"
section of transmission line. In this AWR AXIEM project, the lengths and widths of each array element and the connecting
transmission lines were defined with variables to allow optimization of the overall array performance.
Figure 10: Series feed 1x8 patch array with parameterized modifiers
The 1x8 array can be further expanded into an 8x8 array for a high-gain, fixed-beam design, as shown in Figure 11, replicating
the 8x8 element array reported in
2
.
Figure 11: 77GHz 8x8 array with N*λ/2 feeding with λ/2 < spacing <λ
