The role of radar transceivers in autonomous driving

With the continuous progress of the Ministry of Science and Technology, the requirements for chips in various fields have also increased. Among them, the chips used in automobiles have become the most concerned topic at the moment.

NXP® Semiconductors, a development company, announced the production launch of its second-generation RFCMOS radar transceiver family, the TEF82xx. The transceiver is optimized for fast chirp and supports short-, medium- and long-range radar applications, including cascaded high-resolution imaging radars. The TEF82xx provides 360-degree sensing for safety-critical applications, including automatic emergency braking, adaptive cruise control, blind-spot monitoring, cross-traffic alert, and automatic parking.

Radar is becoming a key sensing mode for ADAS functions in traditional passenger cars as well as for MaaS (Mobility as a Service). On the road to fully autonomous driving, greater accuracy and higher RF performance are required to “see” farther and with finer resolution to accurately detect, separate and classify smaller objects. TEF82xx radar transceivers implement all of the above. Combining NXP’s scalable S32R radar processor family with TEF82xx RFCMOS radar transceivers provides the fine angular resolution, processing power and ranging required for imaging radar solutions.

Based on NXP’s mature RFCMOS technology node and production setup, the receiver offers significant improvements over the previous generation, such as more than double the RF performance, including +6 dB phase noise improvement, -95 dBc/Hz low phase noise , 14 dBm output power and 11.5 dB receiver noise figure. The TEF82xx is packaged in an ultra-compact eWLB package with an exposed die for optimal heat transfer even at higher ambient temperatures, meeting the harsh thermal conditions in high performance radar applications. The ultra-short chirp return time of only 4µs reduces power-on time, which reduces sensor power consumption, and allows for shorter chirp interval times for improved velocity estimation.

With the comprehensive radar algorithm library provided by the automotive-grade radar software development kit (RSDK), developers can easily build and optimize applications without manually fine-tuning the accelerator software. Engineers can also take advantage of NXP’s vast ecosystem of compilers, development environments, MCAL, and free and commercial RTOS support for the resources they need to develop faster.