Synchronous signal acquisition and processing in FMCW-radar applications

This paper introduces a new method of signal acquisition, processing and data representation for improved system performance in Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW) radar systems. The method utilizes synchronization between ramp generation and baseband signal conversion to significantly improve target recognition in processing algorithms. Even under heavy noise situations the target frequency in the FFT spectrum can be isolated from the noise floor with an improvement of 6dB over conventional approaches. As a side effect the method helps to save processing time by dropping calculation steps of common signal processing chains.