New CMOS transceiver MMIC offers high performance for automotive radar

Infineon Technologies AG released the world‘s first 77GHz automotive radar chip based on SiGe in 2009. Today, it announced the RASIC CTRX8181 transceiver – its next innovation radar and latest product in a series of new 76GHz to 81GHz radar MMICs based on 28nm CMOS technology. The improved SNR and linearity of the transceiver offers high system-level performance and resilience. Also, the easy-to-use radar transceiver simultaneously provides a scalable platform approach for various sensor including corner, front and short range, together with flexibility for new software-defined-vehicle architectures. This enables 77GHz automotive radar applications at lower development costs.

“The new CTRX8181 transceiver enables a reliable object separation and detection necessary for protecting vulnerable road users including motorcyclists, cyclists or pedestrians,” said Tomas Lucia, head of Product Marketing Radar MMIC at Infineon’s Automotive Division. “The increased RF performance is a prerequisite for the successful deployment of dependable assisted and automated driving functions for all SAE levels, up to Level 4.”

The device is developed according to the latest ISO26262 safety standards and is provided with four transmit and four receive channels. The device offers excellent SNR and increases the standard module range by up to 25% (e.g. from 250m to more than 300mm). The higher RF-channel count with enhanced linearity also allows 33% higher vertical or angular resolution to enable a better separation between different objects such as pedestrians next to cars. These features add to the development of radar modules for all applications – from corner radar to high-resolution radar.

The new CTRX product family is best combined with the company's radar specific AURIX MCUs TC3x and upcoming TC4x, both with integrated SPU and non-volatile memory for on-chip program code storage. The AURIX chipset and CTRX allow the best performance for future NCAP and real-world scenarios included as better reliability for radar function in bad weather conditions.

The system partitioning allows vendors the flexibility to provide conventional solutions with full processing capabilities in the radar but also enables different architectures, including pre-processed data streaming over 100Mbit/s or 1Gbit/s Ethernet with minimal effort. The splitting also enables the selection of appropriate MMIC and microcontroller for target applications to allow easy scaling to support various cost and performance needs. The connection to the MCU is established through either LVDS or CSI-2 to provide greater flexibility to combine components.