A high-resolution short-range CMOS impulse radar for human walk tracking

A single-chip impulse radar transceiver is presented. A high-resolution, enhanced SNR and controllability are achieved with a proposed architecture. By controlling timing between the transmit (TX) pulse and sampling clock of the receiver, echo pulses from targets are received and recovered. The TX pulse can adjust its spectrum occupancy by changing impulse shape. The 4-channel sampling receiver consists of a low noise amplifier, track and hold samplers, integrators, and a cascaded triple delay locked loop. The embedded control logic allows the radar to enhance the SNR of the received pulse using an averaging technique, and to operate at multiple reception modes. The real-time radar system measurements show that echo pulses are recovered with ≥100-psec range resolution while consuming 80 mW from 1.2-V of Vdd. An indoor human walking trace is successfully recorded. The transceiver is fabricated in a 130-nm CMOS technology occupying chip area of 3.4 mm².