Novel mmWave MIMO Radar System Using AWR Software

Designers at VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland Ltd. (VTT) were tasked with developing a 60 GHz frequency-modulated continuous wave (FMCW), frequency-division multiplexing (FDM), multiple-in-multiple-out (MIMO) radar system for short-range, high-resolution detection of nearby moving objects when the radar itself might be moving, in order to capture the flow of people, drones, and other autonomous systems. In addition, the system supports simultaneous localization and mapping, object detection, and remote multi-target vital sign measurements for medical applications. An FDM MIMO architecture was chosen to address the technical requirements for fast imaging and high resolution of multiple targets. Using MIMO techniques, 64 virtual channels were synthesized with only eight RX and eight TX channels (Figure 1), thereby significantly reducing the number of physical elements. This greatly reduces the system complexity, size, and cost.