Technical Articles

Design of FMCW Radars for Active Safety Applications

By Marco Roggero, John Zhao, and Giorgia Zucchelli, MathWorks


With 28,000 road fatalities in 2012 in Europe, car manufacturers, automotive electronics suppliers, and universities are working to develop new electronic systems for accident prevention and collision mitigation. Frequency modulated continuous waveform (FMCW) radars fit automotive active safety system requirements because of their accurate short-range measurements, low sensitivity to clutter, and easy integration.

To assess the feasibility of high-volume production of FMCW radars, it is necessary to evaluate the reliability and cost of the individual RF components used for the radar implementation and their impact on overall performance.

This paper describes a workflow and tool chain for modeling and simulating a complete 77 GHz FMCW radar system, including waveform generation, antenna characterization, channel interference and noise, and digital signal processing algorithms for range and speed determination.

This paper was presented at Embedded World Conference 2015.

Read full paper.

Published 2015

View Articles for Related Capabilities

View Articles for Related Industries