Electrical Poles, Bridges, Fast Cars, and 10+ Lanes View beyond 400m at the Edge

That's TRUE Long-Range 4D Imaging radar!

Join us at IEEE MTT-S International Microwave Symposium (IMS) this week where Metawave Corporation solutions will be displayed in Global Foundries booth.

Dr. Maha Achour will be presenting Enhancing Safety and AI Perception using Multi-Functional Radar Sensing and V2V Communication on Tuesday at the "Connected Future Summit"

Dr. Kevin Xiaoxiong Gu will be presenting A Next-Generation Hybrid Analog Beamsteering and MIMO Digital Radar for Highly Automated Driving at the "Automotive and MIMO Radar Session"

The multi-billion mobility industry (comprising automotive, telecom, IoT, and infrastructure sectors for transportation) is on the brink of a paradigm shift. The industry is transitioning from a reliance on human drivers, to driver assist (ADAS), and eventually to fully self-driving vehicles on the ground and in the air for commercial, government and defense applications. When it is fully adopted sometime in the coming decade, this transformation will be equivalent to the proliferation of cellular networks and mobile devices in terms of human productivity and economic growth.

At the heart of the autonomous vehicle is the “Brain” — a seamlessly integrated, well-tuned system of hardware and software components that control the vehicle and communicate with the sensors positioned around the vehicle that detect and analyze its environment and surroundings. These edge sensing and centralized compute systems are powered by state-of-the-art semiconductor chips that run complex algorithms and process signals from simple but sophisticated analog circuitry for sensing and communication to attain the stringent safety requirements (from redundancy to latency) required for Level 4 (no human interaction required) autonomy. The distributed and networked vehicles concept enabled by Metawave’s semiconductor, system, and software solutions enables real-time long-range all-weather and all-terrain radar sensing, communication, and object classification for commercial, federal, and defense applications.

Radar plays a critical role in the sensor integration and perception implementation of advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) systems and self-driving operations. Advances in radio-frequency (RF) technologies and digital signal processing (DSP) have made it possible to design efficient radars at lower cost and in smaller form factors. Most modern automotive radars have been improving their performance such as range and angular resolution by utilizing advanced digital beamforming (DBF) and virtual array methodologies known as Multiple-Input-Multiple-Output (MIMO). However, such an approach has a significant computational burden and lacks sufficient equivalent isotropic radiated power (EIRP) and signal-to-noise ratio due to its direct wide field-of-view illumination. In this talk, we will present the world’s first advanced analog, digitally enhanced beamsteering MIMO radar, which supports both virtual-array-based digital scanning in azimuth and analog beam steering in elevation for long range detection (e.g., pedestrian sensing at 300m) with high angular resolution and lower computational requirements. The talk will discuss and highlight challenges in the design, implementation, and characterization of such a complex high-performance radar system, including different levels of RF components such as a 76–81GHz 16-channel phased-array beamforming IC, scalable antenna-in-package (AiP), and frontend system board with radar transceivers and processing unit integration. The actual radar system demonstration will also be presented in the talk.