One-Chip Radar Ready for Traffic Monitoring, Mining, and Logistics

March 21, 2023

The sensor provides the full capability of NXP’s third-generation 28-nm RFCMOS, long-range detection—2 to 300 meters worth of detection range—plus elevation sensing.

William G. Wong

Related To: Electronic Design

Check out more of our CES 2023 coverage.

Advanced driving-assistance systems (ADAS) often employ radar. On that front, NXP's SAF85xx RFCMOS automotive, solid-state radar family supports these types of applications, including those for self-driving cars (see figure). The system-on-chip (SoC), which utilizes frequency-modulated continuous-wave (FMCW) technology, can handle 76- to 81-GHz frequencies for automotive radar. I talked with Matthias Feulner, NXP's Senior Director for ADAS, about solid-state radar and NXP's offering (see video above).

NXP's SAF85xx family of single-chip radar processing units can detect obstacles and handle elevation sensing with a detection range from 2 to 300 meters.

The SAF85xx includes a radar transceiver integrated into a compute engine that includes Arm Cortex-A53 and Arm Cortex-M7 cores. The transceiver incorporates four transmitters and four receivers along with the ADC support, phase rotator, low-phase-noise VCO, SPT radar accelerator, and BBE32 Vector DSP. The family is ISO 26262-compliant and suitable for ASIL Level B applications. It's designed to meet SHE+, EVITA Full security requirements through its HSE security engine.

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About the Author

William G. Wong | Senior Content Director

I am Editor of Electronic Design focusing on embedded, software, and systems. As Senior Content Director, I also manage Microwaves & RF and I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, programmers, developers and technical managers with interesting and useful articles and videos on a regular basis. Check out our free newsletters to see the latest content.>

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I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.

I still get a hand on software and electronic hardware. Some of this can be found on our Kit Close-Up video series. You can also see me on many of our TechXchange Talk videos. I am interested in a range of projects from robotics to artificial intelligence.