Imaging Radars at Scale — From Automotive to Security Applications

Imaging radars have proven to provide unparalleled capabilities in terms of range-Doppler processing. Nowadays, integrated silicon radars are driving many advances in the ADAS applications and being further developed to become a key sensor for autonomous driving. Thanks to the mm-wave physics, penetration through fog or even rain has become feasible; that is otherwise not the case with other sensor modalities. On the other hand, however, the coarser wavelength comes with the price of limiting the effective imaging aperture, hence angular resolution suffers significantly. Advanced signal processing techniques are typically utilized to recover some of the angular detection performance by relying on Doppler filtering or phase tracking for instance. Nevertheless, imaging radars have been unable to match the higher angular resolution provided by light-based sensors, like LIDAR or ToF. Such technical gap has encouraged many researchers and industrial leaders to boost the radar angular resolution by expanding their aperture through using cascading methods to achieve even larger antenna arrays. In this talk, a discussion on recent trends on establishing massive cascaded imaging radars will be delivered and accompanied by several examples around automotive, industrial, and security applications, where imaging radars are vital. The related technical challenges and opportunities based on scalable SiGe and CMOS radars will be underlined to highlight the recent progresses witnessed in digital and analog MIMO radars among others.