Challenges on the Design of Automotive Radar Systems and V2V Technology 2014-36-0356

Automotive radar and Vehicle to Vehicle (V2V) technology are currently being developed focusing in the safety of the drivers and passengers. The U.S. Department of Transportation's National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NTHSA) announced that it is going to create a formal path forward for vehicle-to-vehicle communication for light vehicles meaning that NTHSA will start regulatory proposals on how this technology could become mandatory in the future. Automotive short-range radar (SRR) uses the electromagnetic field distribution around a vehicle including reflection from other objects to detect obstacles. If the vehicle is moving the radars can warn the driver to possible impacts and even automatically trigger safety devices such as seat belts or air bags. One of the biggest challenges on the design of SRR is the high frequency of operation which makes it difficult the use numerical simulation due to the small wavelength, leading to electrical large models. SRR works on 24 GHz and 79 GHz bands. The 79 GHz band is considered to be the long-term operating frequency for SRR. The challenges on the design of V2V technology are related to security issues of the system. Since V2V can act in a passive way (alerting the driver only) and in an active way (triggering actions and devices in the vehicle) the security of the information that is being transmitted must be very protected. Nevertheless, this work focuses only on the physical layer of the system, meaning that only the physical devices are going to be detailed. As for V2V, the one of the biggest challenge is to early predict communication between vehicles using simulation due to the large model that would include many vehicles. This work presents the design of an automotive SRR system on silicon technologies and its performance on a vehicle. A V2V example showing the communication among vehicles is also. Lastly, an application including V2V and SRR in a vehicle is demonstrated.