Nxp B.v.

Francesco Laghezza

Feike Guus Jansen

Arie Geert Cornelis Koppelaar

Jeroen Overdevest

Yiting Lu

Franz Lampel

Semih Serbetli

Marco Jan Gerrit Bekooij

Frans M J Willems

Saif Alhasson

Alex Alvarado

Julian Renner

Anusha Ravish Suvarna

Method and apparatus for determination of direction of arrival angle

A data processing device and method for detecting interference in FMCW radar signals, configured to use an adaptive thresholding technique to identify interference in a plurality of samples forming a beat signal, the adaptive thresholding including grouping the plurality of samples into a plurality of subsets, determining a maximum magnitude of each subset and extracting an nth lowest maximum magnitude of the plurality of subsets to determine an adaptive threshold, and applying the adaptive threshold to each sample to generate a mask.

Radar interference detection

A method of processing radar signalling, the method comprising: receiving a mask () that represents samples in the radar signalling that are detected as including interference. The mask () comprises a matrix of data having a first dimension and a second dimension, wherein the first dimension represents a fast-time axis and the second dimension represents a slow-time axis. The method further comprises performing frequency analysis on the mask () across each of the fast-time axis and the slow-time axis of the mask in order to provide a range-Doppler processed mask (); and deconvolving a range-Doppler map () of the received radar signalling using the range-Doppler processed mask () in order to provide a deconvolved-range-Doppler map ().

Method of processing radar signalling

An apparatus configured to receive an input dataset,, indicative of radar signals reflected from targets as received at a plurality of antenna elements; define a matrix, A, formed of direction-of-arrival-angle vectors,, each direction-of-arrival-angle vector representing an expected response at the plurality of antenna elements of radar signals from one of the targets; define a signal amplitude vectorto represent expected complex amplitudes as received in the radar signals; define an objective function based on, A and; search for a set of direction of arrival angles for each of the plurality of targets by the repeated evaluation of the objective function for a plurality of candidate matrices based on matrix A; and wherein said search space comprises a plurality of discrete points, z, associated with the direction of arrival angles by a function of sin(θ).

Aspects of the present disclosure are directed to radar apparatuses and methods involving the communication of data with radar signals. As may be implemented with one or more embodiments, a sequence of radar waveforms are transmitted as RF signals, the RF signals carrying communication data encoded onto a ramped radar carrier signal via phase-shift keying (PSK) modulation. Such modulation may utilize a modified, reduced-angle modulation with phase angles of less than π. Object-reflected versions of the RF signals are received and demodulated by deramping the received object-reflected versions of RF signals using a linearized version of the radar waveforms (e.g., without PSK modulation). This approach can mitigate compression peak loss.

Radar sensing

In imaging radar, examples are directed to uses of multiple sets of transmit antenna included with transceiver circuitry, for transmitting in a plurality of modes. Transmissions may involve having at least one transmit antenna, from each of at least two of the multiple sets, to transmit continuous-wave energy concurrently (simultaneously) in one or more of the plurality of different modes. Transceiver circuitry may include multiple receive antennas which may be receiving reflections of the continuous-wave energy from various targets. Signals from the multiple receive antennas may route to signal processing circuitry. The signal processing circuitry may respond to the received reflections of the continuous-wave energy by assessing differences in antenna gain and/or phase due to transmit antenna position associated with the received reflections. This signal processing assessment may mitigate or resolve at least one spatial ambiguity in at least one direction of arrival dimension associated with the received reflections.

Multiple-mode radar with resolution of spatial ambiguity

A mechanism is provided for determining an unambiguous direction of arrival (DoA) for radio frequency (RF) signals received by a sparse array. A DoA angle domain is split into hypothesis regions. The hypothesis regions are derived from the phase differences of the antenna element pairs used for the DoA angle estimate. In each hypothesis region, the ambiguous phase of antenna element pairs is unwrapped according to expected wrap-around. After unwrapping the phase, for each hypothesis region, a phasor is calculated by combining the individual antenna element pair phasors. The hypothesis region that obtains the phasor with a largest amplitude is selected as the most likely DoA region and the phase of the winning phasor is used as an unambiguous estimate for the DoA angle.

Method and system for single target direction of arrival estimation for sparse array radar systems

A radar system is disclosed that provides joint object detection and communication capabilities. The radar system includes a communication signal generator that provides a communication signal, a pre-distortion module that applies a pre-distortion to the communication signal to provide a pre-distorted communication signal, a linear frequency modulation (LFM) signal generator that provides a LFM signal, and a mixer that mixes the pre-distorted communication signal onto the LFM signal to provide a radar signal to be transmitted by the radar system. The radar system further includes an all-pass filter that filters a plurality of de-ramped reflected images of the radar signal to provide a filtered signal. Each de-ramped reflected image includes an associated image of the pre-distorted communication signal. The all-pass filter provides a linear group delay, and a non-linear phase response. The pre-distortion is an inverse of the non-linear phase response of the all-pass filter.

Predistortion technique for joint radar/communication systems

Embodiments are directed to a method for determining velocity of an object. The method includes in response to two interleaved chirp sequences being sent towards the object, processing responsive chirps of each of the two interleaved chirp sequences independently from one another to produce respective Doppler-spectrum data sets, and calculating the velocity of the object based on the respective Doppler-spectrum data sets. Each of the interleaved chirp sequences being characterized by a common time spacing between respective chirps of the respective chirp sequence, and each chirp of one of the chirp sequences being offset by an amount of time that is different than the common time spacing.

Radar apparatuses and methods involving determination of velocity of an object

A data processing device and method for detecting interference in a FMCW radar system are described. For each of a plurality of transmitted chirps of the radar system, a high pass filter is applied to a receiver signal of a receiver channel of a radar receiver during an acquisition time corresponding to a transmitted chirp to remove those parts of the receiver signal corresponding to a reflected chirp having a power at the radar receiver greater than the noise power of the radar receiver of the radar system. The receiver signal power is calculated from the high pass filtered receiver signal. The receiver signal power is compared with a threshold noise power based on an estimate of the thermal noise of the radar receiver to determine whether the receiver signal corresponds to an interfered received chirp including interference or a non-interfered received chirp not including interference.

A mechanism is provided to determine if a short-range automotive radar detection is a direct reflection or an indirect (also known as 'multipath') reflection from a physical target object. The multipath information is further used to perform a height estimation of the object. Embodiments provide a radar system having a range resolution smaller than a path difference between the direct reflection path and the indirect reflection path. Both range separation techniques and Doppler separation techniques are utilized to provide a reliable and accurate estimation of the height of the object.

Method and system for height estimation in ultra-short-range radar

Aspects of the present disclosure are directed to a method and/or apparatus involving frequency modulated continuous wave (FMCW) radar signals. As my be implemented in accordance with one or more embodiments, receiver circuitry is configured and arranged to receive a FMCW radar signal having an information signal embedded into a radar waveform, and to indicate a relationship in the FMCW radar signal between beat frequency magnitude and time delay. A filter processing circuit is configured and arranged to filter the information signal in the FMCW radar signal by applying a group delay function based on the relationship between beat frequency magnitude and time delay. Signal processing circuitry is configured and arranged to detect a remote object by using the filtered FMCW radar signal.

Growing community of inventors

Eindhoven, Netherlands

Francesco Laghezza