A 79GHz UWB pulse-compression vehicular radar in 90nm CMOS

A 79GHz UWB pulse-compression (PC) vehicular radar system is presented. A PC waveform is a long pulse with internal modulation. The energy of it can be increased without raising the instantaneous peak power. Meanwhile, a PC waveform preserves an equal bandwidth and the range resolution associated with a single pulse waveform. In addition, the PC technique also allows multiple radars operating simultaneously based on the code division multiple accessing (CDMA). In this work, the internal modulation of the PC waveform is binary phase shift keying (BPSK) with a 31-bit length pseudo noise (PN) sequence. The modulation rate is 1 Gb/s and the maximum pulse width is 31 nsec. The CMOS chip presents a self-contained radar system with the transmitter, receiver, frequency synthesizer, and complete timing circuit fully integrated in a standard 90nm CMOS technology.