Millimeter-Wave Cost-Effective Phased-Array Radar with Orthogonally Located Linear Tx and Rx Arrays

• Main Authors: Hiraki, Mitsuru, Motoda, Yuji, Tanaka, Tomoyuki, Ota, Yoshiyuki, Morikoshi, Nobuyuki, Yokota, Ryo, Kuramoto, Takafumi, Uchida, Shinichi, Yanagita, Tomonori, Nakamura, Takahiro, Sun, Guanghao, Kirimoto, Tetsuo, Suzuki, Satoshi
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Subjects: millimeter wave radar; Monitoring; phase shifter; Phase shifters; phased array; Phased arrays; Prototypes; Radar; Radar antennas; radar imaging; Radar signal processing; vital sign monitoring
• ISSN: 2576-7216
• DOI: 10.1109/MWSYM.2019.8701078

This paper proposes a cost-effective phased-array radar with an extremely small number of antennas and reduced signal processing complexity compared with a conventional 2D phased-array radar. The key techniques to realize the feature are 1D linear Tx and Rx antenna arrays located orthogonally to each other and the combination of analog-beamforming Tx and digital-beamforming Rx. The effectiveness of the proposed phased-array radar was verified by simulation and 3D spatial profiling experiments. The experiments were performed using a 79GHz prototype radar system that we developed. A phase shifter which was robust against process/temperature variations and whose phase error was reduced to smaller than 2.0 degrees was designed, fabricated in 28nm CMOS process, and used for the analog-beamforming Tx of the prototype radar. A contactless vital sign monitoring system which tracks and continuously monitors the target person in the room was demonstrated using the prototype radar system.