Consumer radar: Technology and limitations

Recent advances in micro-electronics have created the possibility of building very low cost, very small, high performance single chip Radar systems. Concurrent with this technological advance, a diverse range of new applications for such radar systems is emerging. The coming consumer radar revolution is on the verge of entering the market place in areas including automotive radar, bicycle radar, micro-UAV radar, and many other applications. This short paper briefly describes the current state of the technology covering RF, signal processing and antenna systems. We also introduce recent work on performance limitations of such systems including radar information theory and its connections with quantum mechanics.