Design of compact and low-power X-band Radar for mobility surveillance applications

This paper presents the design of a compact Radar for real-time detection of targets in smart mobility applications. The Radar integrates Fabry-Perot resonating antennas, X-band and configurable continuous wave transceiver, high-speed analog-digital-converter and low-power/low-cost FPGA for the baseband signal processing. The latter includes region-of-interest selection, 2D Fast Fourier Transform for range-Doppler map extraction, peak detection and alarm decision logic. The transmitted power can be configured from few mW to 1.8W. This allows for a trade-off between the maximum detection range, from few hundreds of meters up to 1.54km, and the Radar power consumption, from 2.56W to 11.66W. The measured speed is up to 40m/s. The speed and distance resolutions are 0.3m/s and 37.5cm, respectively. The configurable Radar features increased robustness vs. laser-scanners, video cameras, or induction loops detection techniques, and stands for its better trade-off in terms of covered range, size, and low-power consumption vs. state-of-the-art surveillance Radars. Design of a compact Radar module for real-time detection of targets in smart mobility applications.Real-time implementation of Radar signal processing tasks on low-cost and low-power FPGA, reducing power dissipation vs. state-of-the-art designs using GPU (Graphical Processing Units) and GPP (General Purpose Processors).Radar parametric analysis highlighting the inter-dependencies existing among Radar performance and analog and digital circuit parameters. This allows a co-design of the mixed-signal Radar transceiver with the FPGA-based digital signal processing, and a trade-off between the Radar performance and its implementation complexity.Coarse-grained and a fine-grained configurability of the Radar transmitted power, which allows for different trade-offs between the system power consumption and the maximum covered range.