MIMO Radars and beamforming with multichip cascading

Angle estimation and angle resolution is one of key requirements in RADAR systesm. The angular resolution of a RADAR sensor is governed by number of transmitters(TXs) and receivers(RXs) of the system. Typical single chip RADAR sensors offers only 3 Tx and 4 RX which limits the angular resolution to 10-15º. In order to reduce the false alarm rate for increased safety an improved the angular resolution as low as sub 1º would be needed. To achieve sub 1º angular resolution a larger array of TX and RX chains are needed , which would lead to increased components and board space. Techniques to synthesize an equivalent receive array of length N, using lesser number of antennas will be presented. In order to synthesize virtual arrays, multiple radar chips needs to be cascaded and circuit/system challenges in multichip cascaded RADAR systems will be presented.