SiGe BiCMOS Pulsed Radar Opens Door To Imaging And Gesture Recognition

Aug. 30, 2013

While eliminating any RF or IF phase shifting or combining, this array architecture simplifies scaling to a larger number of nodes.

Nancy Friedrich

Silicon devices continue to shrink and, in doing so, become more suitable for applications in bio-medical devices. Examples include large-array, low-power ultrasonic imagers as well as lab-on-chip devices for rapid pathogen detection and DNA sequencing. In addition, diagnostic medical imaging can benefit from the continual cost reduction and/or miniaturization of silicon devices. To leverage silicon’s evolution, a group of researchers recently focused on pulsed-radar technology that can enable the dielectric measurement of tissue for imaging. In this scalable array architecture for three-dimensional (3D) imaging, multiple single-element phase-coherent-transceiver (TRX) chips (which boast programmable transmit pulse-delay capability) are mounted on a common printed-circuit board (PCB) to realize the array.

To enable this transmit chip, an integrated, 94-GHz phase-coherent pulsed radar with on-chip antennas was designed by Amin Arbabian and Mustafa Rangwala from Stanford University together with Steven Callender, Shinwon Kang, and Ali M. Niknejad from the University of California at Berkeley. The transceiver chip achieves a 10-GHz frequency-tuning range and 300 ps of contiguous pulse position control, which paves the way for its use in a large-array imager with time-domain transmit beamforming. That phase-coherent transceiver can transmit and receive pulses as narrow as 36 ps, which translates to 30 GHz of bandwidth. According to interferometric measurements, it can attain single-target range resolution beyond 375 μm. Delay measurements show that the time of RMS error would be less than 1.3 ps. See “A 94 GHz mm-Wave-to-Baseband Pulsed-Radar Transceiver with Applications in Imaging and Gesture Recognition,” IEEE Journal Of Solid-State Circuits, April 2013, p. 1055.

About the Author

Nancy Friedrich | RF Product Marketing Manager for Aerospace Defense, Keysight Technologies

Nancy Friedrich is RF Product Marketing Manager for Aerospace Defense at Keysight Technologies. Nancy Friedrich started a career in engineering media about two decades ago with a stint editing copy and writing news for Electronic Design. A few years later, she began writing full time as technology editor at Wireless Systems Design. In 2005, Nancy was named editor-in-chief of Microwaves & RF, a position she held (along with other positions as group content head) until 2018. Nancy then moved to a position at UBM, where she was editor-in-chief of Design News and content director for tradeshows including DesignCon, ESC, and the Smart Manufacturing shows.