Radar on a Chip

This proposal presents an innovative low power and high performance transceiver (TR) microwave monolithic integrated circuit (MMIC) for 10GHz multifunction Radar-On-Chip (ROC) applications. The radar TR MMIC includes a low noise front end with low noise amplifier (LNA) and mixer. The TR MMIC is featured with a high speed and low power analog-to-digital converter (ADC), which allows digitizing the received signal at input frequency beyond 1GHz. The TR MMIC also includes an ultrahigh-speed low power direct digital synthesizer (DDS) with a clock frequency larger than 4.5 GHz. The high-speed DDS includes a sinusoidal weighted digital-to-analog converter (DAC) with 9-bit resolution to achieve better than -50dBc spectral purity. The DDS modulation waveform configurations include chirp, step frequency, FM, MSK, and PM. It uses a low-noise phase lock loop (PLL) to generate both the DDS clock and the local frequency at 9 GHz. The TR MMIC has a power amplifier (PA) with innovative bias boosting scheme to deliver larger than 100mW output at 10GHz with high power added efficiency (PAE). The proposed TR MMIC using commercially available SiGe technology can achieve low power consumption of less than 10W for X-band radar applications.