An X-band radar receiver with bandwidth reduction implemented in 0.13µm SiGe technology

This paper presents an X-band chirp radar receiver with bandwidth reduction for range detection. The proposed receiver is composed primarily of a RF front end with reconfigurable bandwidth, a receiver baseband and an ADC. The receiver uses dual down-conversion architecture to convert the X-band chirp signal to the baseband signal, which is further mixed with a replica of the transmitted chirp through stretch processing in a modified Weaver receiver. The resulting waveform is of greatly reduced bandwidth and thus relaxes the power and bandwidth requirements of the ADC. The de-stretched baseband waveform is a single tone signal with a fixed frequency that is related to the range of the target. Therefore, the proposed radar receiver with stretch processing achieves power and bandwidth reductions without degrading the range resolution. The radar receiver including a 12-b ADC was implemented in a 0.13μm SiGe technology with die area of 2.64 mm² and total power consumption of 403 mW from the 2.2V and 1.5V power supplies.