Design and Implementation of mmWave Phased-array Radar for Three-dimensional Imaging

In this paper, a millimeter wave (mmWave) phased-array FMCW (frequency modulated continuous wave) imaging radar with 2.4GHz bandwidth is developed, which is composed of the radio frequency (RF) front-end module, L-shaped antenna arrays, intermediate frequency (IF) module and the baseband module. The phase shifters in the RF front-end are applied to control the beam scanning. After pointing the transmitting beam to a specific direction, the receiving beam searches for the target position using digital beamforming technique, and then switches to the next transmitting beam, thus the radar can detect and locate the target in a wide two-dimensional domain, and the target distance can then be achieved from the received IF signal. It greatly reduces the number of RF channels while ensuring imaging accuracy. The experiment results show that this architecture can be well used in imaging systems.