Department of Electronics and Telecommunications, Politecnico di Torino, 10129 Torino, Italy.
Sensors (Basel). 2023 Jun 1;23(11):5271. doi: 10.3390/s23115271.
Radars have been widely deployed in cars in recent years, for advanced driving assistance systems. The most popular and studied modulated waveform for automotive radar is the frequency-modulated continuous wave (FMCW), due to FMCW radar technology's ease of implementation and low power consumption. However, FMCW radars have several limitations, such as low interference resilience, range-Doppler coupling, limited maximum velocity with time-division multiplexing (TDM), and high-range sidelobes that reduce high-contrast resolution (HCR). These issues can be tackled by adopting other modulated waveforms. The most interesting modulated waveform for automotive radar, which has been the focus of research in recent years, is the phase-modulated continuous wave (PMCW): this modulated waveform has a better HCR, allows large maximum velocity, permits interference mitigation, thanks to codes orthogonality, and eases integration of communication and sensing. Despite the growing interest in PMCW technology, and while simulations have been extensively performed to analyze and compare its performance to FMCW, there are still only limited real-world measured data available for automotive applications. In this paper, the realization of a 1 Tx/1 Rx binary PMCW radar, assembled with connectorized modules and an FPGA, is presented. Its captured data were compared to the captured data of an off-the-shelf system-on-chip (SoC) FMCW radar. The radar processing firmware of both radars were fully developed and optimized for the tests. The measured performances in real-world conditions showed that PMCW radars manifest better behavior than FMCW radars, regarding the above-mentioned issues. Our analysis demonstrates that PMCW radars can be successfully adopted by future automotive radars.
近年来，雷达已广泛应用于汽车，用于先进的驾驶辅助系统。在汽车雷达中，应用最广泛、研究最多的调制波形是调频连续波（FMCW），因为 FMCW 雷达技术易于实现且功耗低。然而，FMCW 雷达存在一些局限性，例如抗干扰能力差、距离-多普勒耦合、时分复用（TDM）时最大速度有限以及高距离旁瓣降低高对比度分辨率（HCR）。这些问题可以通过采用其他调制波形来解决。在汽车雷达中，最有趣的调制波形是相位调制连续波（PMCW）：这种调制波形具有更好的 HCR，允许更大的最大速度，由于码正交性，可以实现干扰缓解，并简化通信和感测的集成。尽管 PMCW 技术越来越受到关注，并且尽管已经进行了广泛的仿真来分析和比较其性能与 FMCW，但对于汽车应用，仍然只有有限的实际测量数据可用。在本文中，提出了一种由连接器模块和 FPGA 组装而成的 1Tx/1Rx 二进制 PMCW 雷达的实现方案。将其捕获的数据与市售片上系统（SoC）FMCW 雷达的捕获数据进行了比较。两个雷达的雷达处理固件都针对测试进行了全面开发和优化。在真实条件下的测量性能表明，PMCW 雷达在上述问题方面的表现优于 FMCW 雷达。我们的分析表明，PMCW 雷达可以成功应用于未来的汽车雷达。
