OREANDA-NEWS. Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd. today announced that it has produced a transceiver chip for millimeter-wave radar in a complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) implementation, which is a semiconductor process that enables costs to be reduced, while at the same time successfully boosting the short-range detection performance of the transceiver.

Existing millimeter-wave radar uses silicon-germanium (SiGe) transceiver chips. Using CMOS would allow for lower costs and lower power consumption than SiGe, but it is more susceptible to noise, particularly in lower frequency ranges, which has made the use of CMOS for millimeter-wave radar impractical to date.

Fujitsu Laboratories has succeeded in producing a prototype CMOS transceiver chip that suppresses oscillator noise on the receiver circuit by configuring a frequency-conversion circuit so that it is compatible with the 76-81 GHz band used in automotive millimeter-wave radar. This greatly reduces noise levels found in previously attempted CMOS transceivers, resulting in performance equivalent to or better than current SiGe chips.

This technology enables power consumption of CMOS-based millimeter-wave radar to be approximately halved compared SiGe chips, and at lower costs.

Details of this technology are being presented at EuMC 2014, the European Microwave Conference 2014, opening October 5 in Rome.