Nanoscale CMOS impulse radar - from research to product

Summary form only given. CMOS Ultra Wideband radar technology gives rise to several new and emerging sensor applications ranging from industrial proximity sensors to advanced medical sensors detecting heart movement and breathing. The ability to see through objects combined with the high processing speed and low energy consumption inherent in nanometer CMOS makes this technology a very competitive approach compared to other sensor technologies like optical, ultrasound and X-ray. Ultra Wideband impulse radars are however in general hard to implement in standard CMOS technology due to the strict requirements on the front-end A/D converter in terms of a multi-GHz conversion rate combined with a high dynamic range. A very high sampling rate is required to achieve sufficient time-domain resolution converting into spatial resolution of the radar system. This talk will focus on an alternative impulse radar architecture utilizing 1-bit A/D conversion moving the processing challenge from the amplitude domain to the time domain. The technique is referred to as Continuous-Time Binary Value (CTBV) and will be the main topic of this presentation which will in particular focus on the utilization of continuous-time signal processing to enhance spatial resolution and conserve energy followed by the main challenges and opportunities related to a full CMOS implementation of the system. The theory will be exemplified with industrial products from Novelda taking advantage of the CTBV technique. In addition different applications and real-life case-studies will be presented along with recent R&D progress within the area.