Parallelized correlator bank for a 1 GHz bandwidth phase modulated CW radar in the 79GHz band

The interest for mmWave automotive radar systems comes from the booming market for driver assistance systems. The 77-81 GHz band has been allocated for vehicular radar. Such radars can be used for a wide variety of applications such as collision avoidance, adaptive cruise control, lane-change assistance or monitoring the surroundings of the car. The 79 GHz PMCW radar system belongs to this family. It can not only measure the distance but also the velocity of targets. In this paper, we propose an optimized hardware implementation of the correlator bank of a phase-modulated radar system that modulates a 79 GHz carrier with a 1 GSps Pseudo-noise sequence. It leverages an advanced FPGA platform by using the BPS software from BEEcube. After integration of the digital logic FPGA and the analog transceiver, a real target detection test has been performed in the lab to verify the DSP functionality and the specifications of the radar system. The DSP functionality is shown to support the high sampling rate resulting in a range resolution of 0.15 m.