On June 6th 2024 at 16:00, Anirudh Praveen Kankuppe Raghavendra Swamy will defend their PhD entitled “LOW POWER MM-WAVE FMCW RADAR RECEIVERS IN V AND D BANDS”.

Everybody is invited to attend the presentation in room D.2.01, or digitally via this link.

From the beginning of 20th Century, RADARs have been the cornerstone of the military arsenal. Radar has served as a prime sensing and tracking device and has evolved in complexity over time, while relying on simple modulation like FMCW (frequency-modulated continuous wave). Earlier radars started with operating frequencies of a few MHz, while modern radars operate at frequencies higher than 30 GHz, termed as mm-wave, to benefit from a large available bandwidth. While retaining their fundamental aspect of range and velocity sensing, today’s radars are found in diverse domestic areas like automotive, indoor sensing, human machine interface and vital signs monitoring. Though range and velocity sensing can be achieved with a single radar transceiver, to sense any angle of arrival, they must be arranged as MIMO (multiple input, multiple output) arrays. As the array size grows, it is paramount to have energy efficient array elements that do not compromise performance. The receiver of such an array should be resistant to leakage from the radar transmitter to the receiver termed as spillover. Otherwise, this spillover can result in saturation of the front-end or baseband circuitry in the receiver. Further, to have a better range resolution, the bandwidth of the front-end should be as high as possible. In this work, such a mm-wave radar receiver is explored with an emphasis on low power consumption, large RF bandwidth, robustness to spillover, and unique narrow-band filter for spillover or nearby large target attenuation. Two receivers were designed in a 28 nm bulk CMOS process, operating at 60 GHz (V-band) and 140 GHz (D- band) with a power consumption of 5.2 mW and 67 mW and a bandwidth of 10.2 GHz and 18.3 GHz, respectively. Core of the innovations aiding these state-of-the-art power consumption numbers are a mixer-first front-end architecture, a source-degenerated high-pass filter, a variable gain band-pass Gm-C filter, a low-power broadband I/Q RF front-end at D-band, and a unique, tunable narrow-band spillover and target attenuation filters. With this record low power consumption, the radars have been demonstrated to detect multi-targets, pedestrian movement, heartbeat and could filter selective targets in the range with a 13 mm range resolution marking a spot among state-of-the-art FMCW radar receivers and setting a benchmark for the future.