Automotive RADAR Adoption

An Overview

Ram MirwaniDirector, Global Strategic Accounts

NI AWR Group

National Instruments

Topics

Automotive RADAR

Trends for Automotive RADAR

Overview of RADAR

• RADAR = radio detection and ranging

• Radar is an electromagnetic system for the detection and

range of objects

• Where the reflection of the transmitted waveform is used for

detection and range

• And its range (R) is determined by the equation

/2

out R c

back R c 2R out back R c

2R R c

Transmit Pulse

Receive Pulse

Automotive RADAR

• FMCW (Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave)

Frequency of Tx signal is modulated in a linear fashion

Frequency difference (Δf) of reflected signal based on range

Long, Mid, and Short Range RADAR (LRR, MRR, SRR)

Image from www.Altera.com

Automotive RADAR Use Cases

Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC)

Blind Spot Detection (BSD)

Collision Mitigation (CM)

Lane Change Assist (LCA)

Advanced Driver

Assistance Systems

(ADAS)

Trends in Automotive RADAR

• Focus on Safety

360 degrees vehicle surveillance

Object identification/distinction

Rear-end Crash Avoidance

CAR2X (Car 2 Car and Car 2 Infrastructure Communication)

Image from http://www.wykop.pl/link/2349196//

Trends in Automotive RADAR

• Adoption of 77- 81GHz

More reliable and more accurate

Greater capability to distinguish objects with high bandwidth

Smaller footprint (multi mode, multi range)

Image from safecarnews.com

Trends in Automotive RADAR• Autonomous Drive Vehicles

From “Assisted” to “Autonomous”

Sensor Validation and Cross-Check

Sensor Control Unit – RADAR, CAMERA, LIDAR, Ultrasonic

Object identification and Action – Software driven architecture

Image from http://articles.sae.org/10794/

Trends in Automotive RADAR

“Essentially, this front end processing processes the –

possibly multiple – incoming FMCW analog channels to

a single digital stream of azimuth/range/velocity tuples.

This data flows into more CPU cores where software,

possibly supported by additional accelerators, attempts,

to infer the presence, location, and nature surrounding

the vehicle.”

- Ralf Reuter

RADAR Systems Engineer at Freescale Semiconductor

From “Cutting Through the Fog- The road ahead for vehicular radar”,

Ron Wilson, Altera Corporation, 2012

Low-Cost Modular Measurement

and Control Hardware

Productive Software

Development Tools

Highly Integrated

Systems Platforms

Graphical system design combines graphical

programming software with modular hardware,

leveraging the latest technologies

National Instruments in Automotive RADAR

Enable Concurrent Design and Test FlowLink Research to Deployment for Automotive RADAR

DESIGN

VALIDATE

TEST

Summary

Image from http://www.sensethecar.com/35877/