Affordable car radar

Infineon Technologies has joined forces with BMW, Continental, Daimler and Robert Bosch to develop inexpensive radar devices and systems that could be used in cars.

The three-year ‘Radar on Chip for Cars’ (RoCC) project has a budget of more than €17m and is supported by a grant of €8.3m from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).

In the RoCC project, the five companies will work to develop automotive radar sensor systems in the 76GHz to 81GHz frequency range, for long-range systems that cover distances of up to 250m and short-range systems that cover distances between 5cm and 20m.

Results from a previous project called Kokon led to the development and introduction of Infineon’s first 77GHz silicon germanium (SiGe) radar chip family, and the world’s first automotive 77GHz radar system by Bosch, which used the Infineon device.

Using Infineon’s SiGe chips, Continental also demonstrated a short-range radar system that could operate at 79GHz.

Short-range automotive radar devices and systems today use ultra wide band technology at 24GHz.

This frequency, however, is licensed in Europe only up until the year 2013.

The RoCC project aims to develop more devices that will work at 79GHz, and deliver systems that use these higher-frequency devices at a cost that does not exceed today’s 24GHz systems.