Advanced CMOS Transceiver Designs for Automotive Radar Applications
Summary
Automotive radar systems are pivotal for collision avoidance, adaptive cruise control and autonomous driving. Advances in complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) transceiver design have enabled highly integrated front-end solutions operating at 24 GHz and 77 GHz bands, offering low cost, compact form factors and high performance. Key innovations include fully integrated frequency-modulated continuous-wave (FMCW) synthesizers based on fractional-N phase-locked loops (PLLs) with programmable chirp generation, bridged attenuators and multi-stage power amplifiers for stable output power. On the receive side, direct-conversion mixers, noise-cancelled low-noise amplifiers (LNAs), transimpedance amplifiers and biquad filters combine to deliver high gain and low noise figure, while advanced techniques suppress TX-RX leakage and strong reflections. Recent work in fully depleted silicon-on-insulator (FD-SOI) and deep-submicrometre CMOS processes has further enhanced phase-noise performance, bandwidth and dynamic range, driving the evolution of more reliable, cost-effective radar sensors for next-generation vehicles.
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Advanced CMOS Transceiver Designs for Automotive Radar Applications publication trend
The graph below shows the total number of articles in advanced cmos transceiver designs for automotive radar applications across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).
Technical terms
Complementary Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor (CMOS): A technology for constructing integrated circuits using complementary transistor pairs to reduce power consumption.
Transceiver: A single device that integrates both transmitter and receiver functions for bidirectional communication.
Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW): A radar technique in which the carrier frequency is linearly varied over time to measure target range and velocity.
Phase-Locked Loop (PLL): An electronic control system that generates a stable output frequency by locking a voltage-controlled oscillator to a reference signal.
Voltage-Controlled Oscillator (VCO): An oscillator whose output frequency is tuned by an input voltage.
Noise Figure (NF): A measure of the degradation of the signal-to-noise ratio introduced by a component or system.
Low-Noise Amplifier (LNA): An amplifier designed to increase the strength of weak signals with minimal addition of noise.
Chirp: A signal in which frequency increases or decreases over a defined duration, used in radar to encode range information.
References
- Fully Integrated 24-GHz 1TX-2RX Transceiver for Compact FMCW Radar Applications. Sensors (2024).
- CMOS IC Solutions for the 77 GHz Radar Sensor in Automotive Applications. Electronics (2024).
- A W-Band Transmitter for Automotive Radar Sensors in 28-nm FD-SOI CMOS. IEEE Transactions on Microwave Theory and Techniques (2023).
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