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Project description
Today‘s cars are equipped with radar sensors, which provide precise information about the distance, speed and angle to surrounding objects on the road. This information is essential for modern driver assistance systems such as adaptive cruise control or brake assistance systems. Further, it enables future autonomous driving features. Most importantly, however, the accuracy and range of the radar sensors are critical for the safety of the car occupants as well as other daily road users. This is of particular significance since around 90 percent of all rear-end collisions with personal injuries occur due to human mistakes. Assuming all cars on the road to be equipped with emergency brake systems, up to 72 percent of these collisions could be prevented.
For reasons of car appearance as well as protection of the device itself, the radar sensors are often mounted right behind the bumper. This, however, causes unwanted signal reflections from such. Particularly, the reflections yield so-called short-range (SR) leakage, which superimposes reflections of true objects that have to be detected most precisely. Together with disturbances inherently present in the radar transmit signal, the bumper reflections limit the achievable sensitivity and accuracy of the radar sensor severely. As a consequence, driver assistance systems may react delayed in critical situations.
In this Ph.D. project, novel concepts that aim to cancel the SR leakage in the automotive application have been proposed. These are the first known solutions of their kind that can be implemented holistically within an integrated circuit (IC) operating at 77 GHz. The tight design constraints regarding implementation in the IC are circumvented by employing sophisticated statistical signal processing. Simulation as well as measurement results from the developed hardware prototype show that the sensitivity can be more than doubled by applying the proposed concepts.
Ph.D. Project Facts
ISP Research Team
Alexander Melzer
Mario Huemer
Funding
FFG, opens an external URL in a new window (COMET Research Programme)
DICE, opens an external URL in a new window Linz
Partners
DICE, opens an external URL in a new window Linz
LCM, opens an external URL in a new window Linz
Duration
Mar. 2014 - June 2017
Publications
9) Melzer A., Onic A., Huemer M., "Self-Adaptive Short-Range Leakage Canceler for Automotive FMCW Radar Transceivers," in Proceedings of the European Radar Conference (EuRAD 2018), IEEE, Seite(n) 26-29, 2018
8) Wagner M., Sulejmani F., Melzer A., Meissner P., Huemer M., "Threshold-Free Interference Cancellation Method for Automotive FMCW Radar Systems," in Proceedings of the IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS 2018), IEEE, 2018
7) A. Melzer, F. Starzer, H. Jäger and M. Huemer, ”Real-Time Mitigation of Short-Range Leakage in Automotive FMCW Radar Transceivers,” In IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems – II Express Briefs, Vol. 64, No. 7, pp. 847-851, July 2017 (ISSN: 1549-7747, DOI: 10.1109/TCSII.2016.2609467) . Open Access, opens an external URL in a new window.
6) A. Melzer, A. Onic and M. Huemer, "Novel Mixed-Signal Based Short-Range Leakage Canceler for FMCW Radar Transceiver MMICs", In Proceedings of the IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS 2017), Pages 1075-1078, 2016.
5) A. Melzer, A. Onic, and M. Huemer, "Online Phase-Noise Estimation in FMCW Radar Transceivers Using an Artificial On-Chip Target," In IEEE Transactions on Microwave Theory and Techniques, Vol. 64, No. 12, pp. 4789-4800, December 2016 (ISSN: 0018-9480, DOI: 10.1109/TMTT.2016.2614808) . Open Access, opens an external URL in a new window.
4) A. Melzer, A. Onic and M. Huemer, "Phase Noise Estimation in FMCW Radar Transceivers Using an Artificial On-Chip Target", In Proceedings of the IEEE
MTT-S International Microwave Symposium (IMS), 4 pages, 2016.
3) Alexander Melzer, Alexander Onic, Florian Starzer, Mario Huemer, “Short-Range Leakage Cancelation in FMCW Radar Transceiver MMICs Using an Artificial On-Chip Target,” In IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing, Vol. 9, No. 8, pp. 1650-1660, December 2015 (ISSN: 1932-4553, DOI: 10.1109/JSTSP.2015.2465298) . PDF, opens a file.
2) Melzer A., Huemer M., Onic A.: "On the Sensitivity Degradation Caused by Short-Range Leakage in FMCW Radar Systems", in: Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS): Computer Aided Systems Theory - EUROCAST 2015, Volume 9520, Page(s) 513-520, Springer International Publishing, 2015, PDF, opens a file
1) Melzer A., Starzer F., Jäger H., Huemer M.: "On-Chip Delay Line for Extraction of Decorrelated Phase Noise in FMCW Radar Transceiver MMICs", in: Proceedings of the 23rd Austrian Workshop on Microelectronics (Austrochip 2015), Page(s) 31-35, IEEE, 2015 PDF, opens a file
