The radar of the future

Although technology has been significantly improved, state of the art Radars for most applications are mostly still what they have always been in terms of their RF system design since the past 30 to 50 years. For high resolution narrow beams are radiated, generated either by phased arrays, by movable planar arrays or reflectors. The conventional transmitted signals have been for many decades, pulses, chirps or randomly coded signals. The RF/IF processing also did not change much over the years. Future Radars must be significantly improved in their RF system concepts to meet the requirements for angular, range and Doppler information: simultaneous wide area coverage but still high angular resolution; low interference with other RF systems, digital processing for all dimensions, smaller hardware dimensions and, last but not least, they must become cheaper. Future Radar RF frontends will look like communication transceivers with multiple inputs and multiple outputs (MIMO). They will be dominated by digital beamforming, Intelligent signal coding, MIMO Radar and Array Imaging. In the following sections an overview of these future Radar concepts is provided.