Software-configured smart radar sensor for civil and biomedical applications

Software has shown much higher flexibility when compared to hardware so as to be widely used in digital signal processing. In fact, hardware and analog system can also gain merits from the flexibility of software. In this paper, a hybrid radar system is described. Its transmitted signal and operating mode are digitally configured by software, which is different from conventional radar front-end that is mainly decided by hardware. This method helps radar sensors to break through some bottlenecks that traditional radar systems have been long suffering. The limitations of conventional radar for portable civilian applications used to be considered as hardware problems since they are directly related to some physical parameters of radars. In this paper, the presented software-configured radar sensors were tested in civil and biomedical applications, and demonstrates that this method can lead the radar as a mean of wireless sensor to the areas dominated by contact or invasive technology, or can further boost the performance in existing applications.