A scalable direct-sampling broadband radar receiver supporting simultaneous digital multibeam array in 65nm CMOS

Intelligent environments significantly impact human daily lives through embedded sensing and actuating systems. Wireless sensors that can provide non-contact radio information are indispensable. Impulse radar is positioned as a favorable candidate in monitoring and sensing objects [1-3]. The impulse radio is inherently multipath immune and suitable for precision ranging. Accurately detecting signals with low power impulse radios imposes design challenges to impulse radar receivers. In this work, a direct-sampling receiver is proposed and implemented for an impulse radar system. It can support GHz instantaneous bandwidth and more than 100GS/sec equivalent sampling rate through the high-speed sampling circuits and on-chip timing circuitry. The wide bandwidth scattering time-domain waveforms in the radio interaction between the object and radar can be sampled and digitized by the receiver. It achieves precise measurement of time of arrival (TOA) in a radar system and expands the scalability towards antenna arrays for detection of direction of arrival (DOA) [4].