A 94 GHz mm-Wave-to-Baseband Pulsed-Radar Transceiver with Applications in Imaging and

Abstract

High-resolution mm-wave array beamformers have applications in medical imaging, gesture recognition, and navi- gation. A scalable array architecture for 3D imaging is proposed in which single-element phase coherent transceiver (TRX) chips, with programmable TX pulse delay capability, are mounted on a common board to realize the array. This paper presents the design of the enabling TRX ch ip: a highly integrated 94 GHz phase-coherent pulsed-radar with on-chip antennas. The TRX achieves 10 GHz of frequency tuning range and 300 ps of con- tiguous pulse position control, enabling its usage in the large-array imager with time-domain TX beamforming. The TRX is capable of transmitting and receiving pulses down to 36 ps, translating to 30 GHz of bandwidth. Interfero metric measurements show the TRX can obtain single-target range resolution better than 375 m (limited by equipment). Based on delay measurements, the time of arrival rms error would be less than 1.3 ps which, if used in a 3D imaging array, leads to less than 0.36 mm of RMS error in voxel size and position.