Circuit Design Challenges of Highly-Integrated mm-Wave Radar-Based Sensors in SOI Based Technologies

The number of emerging applications based on millimeter-wave radar sensors is continuously increasing. Several consumer applications offer potential of achieving mass volume production. These can be for example motion detectors for lighting control and door openers, gesture sensing in smart phones, MIMO sensors for traffic monitoring or presence detection in railway stations. Driven by the demand for module size reduction, the operating frequencies of the radar modules keep on increasing, as one can integrate antennas in package and reduce the chip size. Furthermore, driven by the demand for cost reduction, the level of integration of the System on Chip (SoC) is always increasing. The amount of external components shall be reduced by integrating more and more analog, digital, power management and RF functional blocks on the same chip, on a smallest chip area and at a lowest price. Advanced silicon-based semiconductor technologies enable such integration, and provide excellent characteristics at mm-wave frequencies. However, in view of these trends, one need to evaluate what is the right technology for a particular mm-waver radar application in terms of RF performance and costs. The right choice of the technology is not necessarily straightforward, as it often depends on the expected product volume and the development of mask costs and wafer costs.