National Instruments demonstrated a new Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) Test Solution at European Microwave Week (EuMW) 2016. The ADAS Test Solution has been designed for short and long-range radars operating from 76 to 81 GHz, and is based on NI’s mmWave front end technology and the recently released PXIe-5840 second-generation vector signal transceiver (VST). This new ADAS Test Solution offers a unique approach to radar characterization and testing with its scalable capability to conduct both traceable RF measurements and system simulation. With regulatory requirements still evolving, the flexibility of this solution allows engineers to quickly adapt their test systems to address the challenges of new radar scenarios.
The ADAS Test Solution combines NI’s second-generation VST with banded, frequency-specific upconverters and downconverters designed to test the 76 to 81 GHz radar band with 1 GHz of real-time bandwidth. The system can function as an mmWave vector signal generator and vector signal analyzer because of this design. Engineers can program the VST’s FPGA with LabVIEW to use the ADAS Test Solution for radar target emulation, a technique in which test equipment emulates the radar cross section, range, radial velocity and angle of arrival of a particular object. This is essential for testing a radar system’s software and hardware.
The demands of fully autonomous driving require that future vehicles use not just radar, but a sensor fusion technique that combines inputs from GNSS, radar, cameras and LiDAR. NI’s PXI platform offers timing, triggering and synchronization capabilities, instruments from DC to RF and bus interfaces like CAN, to provide an ideal solution for testing sensor fusion. Engineers can take advantage of this flexible platform to use a single system to test the sensor hardware and perform more system-level hardware-in-the-loop testing on the embedded software that interprets and makes decisions based on the sensor data.
The new ADAS Test Solution is a part of NI’s flexible software and modular hardware platform that empowers engineers to build smarter test systems and highly customized instrumentation. Users can also benefit from the productivity of the LabVIEW and TestStand software environments, along with a vibrant ecosystem of partners, add-on IP and applications engineers to help dramatically lower the cost of test, reduce time to market and future-proof testers for tomorrow’s challenging requirements.
Audi is one of the Automotive companies who is using the NI PXI solution. According to Niels Koch, radar component owner at Audi, radar is the key technology of the future, and the importance of radar system reliability requires advanced approaches to testing. With the PXI VST, the combination of wide bandwidth and low-latency software allowed them to discover an automotive radar sensor like never before - even allowing them to identify critical bugs in their radar module that they could not detect before.
