OREANDA-NEWS. Fujitsu Limited and Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd. today announced that they have developed a low-noise signal-generating circuit that can be used in automotive radar and other millimeter-band transceivers.

In recent years, to enhance the resolution of radar and expand the capacity of wireless communications, efforts have been focused on developing transceivers operating in the millimeter-band frequency range above 30 GHz. To raise the performance of millimeter-band transceivers and be able to produce them in mass quantities, it is necessary to use silicon-based semiconductors rather than the compound semiconductors that have been used up until now. The problem, however, has been the difficulty of generating low-noise signals in the millimeter band.

Fujitsu has now developed a low-noise signal-generating circuit which consists of multiple comparators for operating sequential comparisons to reference signal. In doing so, they succeeded in reducing unwanted noise in the millimeter-band signal by 5 dB, to roughly one-third of previous levels, paving the way for the production of fully integrated millimeter-band transceiver circuits implemented on silicon semiconductors.

This technology is expected to make a significant contribution to raising the performance - and enabling the mass production - of automotive radars and other millimeter-band transceivers. A portion of these results were obtained through "Advanced Research on 79GHz-band Radar Systems," a research program commissioned by Japan's Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications as part of its "Research and Development project for Expansion of Radio Spectrum Resources".

Details on this technology will be announced at the European Microwave Integrated Circuits Conference 2013 (EuMIC 2013), which opens October 6 in Germany.