A System Analysis of Noise Influences on the Imaging Performance of Millimeter Wave MIMO Radars

Abstract

In this paper a thorough system analysis to evaluate the overall imaging performance of millimeter wave radar systems is presented. All relevant noise influences and their influence on the system performance are considered. A comparison of two imaging radar systems at 160 GHz with different hardware architectures is discussed, one of which is based on monolithic microwave integrated circuits (MMICs) optimized for low phase noise. Radar measurements are performed to evaluate the achievable imaging performance with both realized radar demonstrators. It is shown that the optimization of the phase noise of a single MMIC is not necessarily advantageous when used for multi-channel radar systems.