The present disclosure relates to a radar apparatus that detects a target.
Patent Literature 1 below discloses a frequency modulation technique applicable to a fast chirp modulation (FCM) radar. The FCM radar has features such as a simple configuration, a relatively low frequency band of transmission/reception beat signals subjected to baseband processing, and ease of handling. The FCM radar, which has these features, has been widely used as an automobile collision prevention millimeter-wave radar. It is thus thought that the FCM radar will be used as one of sensors for automatic driving in the future.
A conventional typical FCM radar disclosed in Patent Literature 1 is generally configured such that a high-frequency circuit is provided with a low noise amplifier (LNA). In a radar apparatus with such a configuration, noise of the LNA dominates a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of a reception channel.
Unfortunately, it is difficult to improve the reception SNR of the LNA in a millimeter-wave band used in an automobile sensor and a high-frequency band equivalent to or exceeding the millimeter-wave band. As a result, the conventional radar apparatus suffers from the problem of the LNA limiting a reception SNR of the entire radar apparatus.
The present disclosure has been made in view of the above, and an object of the present disclosure is to obtain a radar apparatus capable of improving a reception SNR of the entire apparatus without providing a high-frequency circuit with an LNA.
In order to solve the above problem and achieve the object, a radar apparatus according to the present disclosure comprises: an antenna unit to emit radar waves into space; a high-frequency circuit to receive, via the antenna unit, a reflected wave of the radar wave from a target; and a baseband circuit to convert reception signals output from the high-frequency circuit into digital baseband signals. A plurality of reception channels is formed in the antenna unit, the high-frequency circuit, and the baseband circuit. The baseband circuit includes: a baseband amplifier to amplify reception signals output from the high-frequency circuit and add amplified parallel reception signals together, on a per reception-channel basis; and an analog-to-digital converter to convert an analog signal output from the baseband amplifier into a digital value.
The radar apparatus according to the present disclosure has the effect of improving the reception SNR of the entire apparatus without providing the high-frequency circuit with the LNA.
A radar apparatus according to an embodiment of the present disclosure will be hereinafter described in detail with reference to the accompanying drawings. Note that an FCM radar will be described as an example in the following embodiment, but this does not exclude application to radar apparatuses other than the FCM radar. Furthermore, in the following description, electrical connection and physical connection are simply referred to as “connection” without being particularly distinguished from each other.
The antenna unit 22 includes a reception array 22a and a transmission array 22b. The reception array 22a includes reception antennas 11 to 14. The transmission array 22b includes transmission antennas 21 and 22. In a case where the radar apparatus 100 is used as an automobile collision prevention millimeter-wave radar, the reception antennas 11 to 14 and the transmission antennas 21 and 22 are arranged in a horizontal direction and in a direction orthogonal to the direction of travelling of an automobile.
Subscripts in the reception antennas 11 to 14 and the transmission antennas 21 and 22 identify channels (chs). In a case where the reception antennas 11 to 14 are not individually distinguished in the following description, the reception antennas 11 to 14 are hereinafter referred to as “reception antennas 1” with no subscripts. In a case where the transmission antennas 21 and 22 are not individually distinguished, the transmission antennas 21 and 22 are hereinafter referred to as “transmission antennas 2” with no subscripts. Such reference applies to other components with subscripts added for identification.
Furthermore, a channel refers to a set of processing units including elements of the transmission/reception unit and the signal processing unit to be processed by a single reception antenna 1 or a single transmission antenna 2. The channel of the reception antenna 1 may be hereinafter referred to as a “reception channel”, and the channel of the transmission antenna 2 may be referred to as a “transmission channel”. In
The high-frequency circuit 17 includes mixers (MIXs) 41 to 44, power amplifiers (PAs) 31 and 32, and a local unit 10. The local unit 10 includes a voltage controlled oscillator (VCO) 5, a phase locked loop (PLL) 6, a loop filter (LF) 7, and a chirp signal generator 8 that is a generator of chirp signals.
The baseband circuit 18 includes baseband amplifiers (BBAs) 201 to 204, band-pass filters (BPFs) 131 to 134, analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) 141 to 144, and finite impulse response filters (FIR filters) 151 to 154. The FIR filter is an example of a digital filter.
The BBA 201 includes NB parallel connected amplifiers (PCAs) 111-1 to 11NB-1 and an adder 121. The symbol “NB”, which is an integer greater than or equal to 2, denotes a parallel addition number. The parallel addition number is the number of combined parallel elements to be added together in the reception 1 ch. The PCAs 111-1 to 11NB-1 are voltage amplifiers having the equivalent voltage gain and the equivalent phase characteristic. The adder 121 adds up signals output from the PCAs 111-1 to 11NB-1.
The BBAs 202 to 204 are configured in the same manner. That is, the BBA 202 includes NB PCAs 111-2 to 11NB-2 and an adder 122. The BBA 203 includes NB PCAs 111-3 to 11NB-3 and an adder 123. The BBA 204 includes NB PCAs 111-4 to 11NB-4 and an adder 124.
The MCU 19 includes FFT processing units 161 to 164 that perform fast Fourier transform (FFT) as Fourier transform processing. The “FFT processing unit” is hereinafter abbreviated as “FFT”.
The MIXs 4, the BBAs 20, the BPFs 13, the ADCs 14, the FIRs 15, and the FFTs 16 are provided in a one-to-one correspondence to the reception antennas 1 of the reception array 22a. That is, each of the MIX 4, the BBA 20, the BPF 13, the ADC 14, the FIR 15, and the FFT 16 is the same in number as the reception channel.
Note that the number of reception channels is four in
Next, the operation of the radar apparatus 100 according to the embodiment will be described with reference to
The reference signal REF, and a chirp signal generated by the chirp signal generator 8 are input to the PLL 6. The PLL 6 modulates the frequency of the reference signal REF with a modulation pattern provided by the chirp signal. The signal frequency-modulated by the PLL 6 is band-limited by the LF 7 and input to the VCO 5. The VCO 5 cooperates with the PLL 6 to output a frequency-modulated high-frequency signal. The high-frequency signal output from the VCO 5 includes a sawtooth-shaped up-chirp signal or a sawtooth-shaped down-chirp signal. The up-chirp signal is a signal that increases in frequency with the lapse of time. The down-chirp signal is a signal that decreases in frequency with the lapse of time.
Each of the PAs 3 amplifies the high-frequency signal into obtain desired power, and outputs the amplified high-frequency signal to the corresponding transmission antenna 2. The transmission antennas 2 convert the high-frequency signals into radar waves that are radio waves, and emit this radar waves into space.
The high-frequency circuit 17 has a function of receiving, via the reception array 22a of the antenna unit 22, reflected waves of the transmitted radar waves from a target, and transmitting the thus received signals to the baseband circuit 18 provided at a stage following the high-frequency circuit 17.
In order to implement the above function, the MIXs 4 down-convert signals output from the reception antennas 1 into signals in an intermediate frequency (IF) band by using a local signal output from the local unit 10. Note that the local signal is linearly modulated in the FCM radar. As a result, generally, the MIXs 4 outputs sine-wave signals. Signals output from the high-frequency circuit 17 are hereinafter referred to as “reception signals”.
The baseband circuit 18 has a function of converting the reception signals output from the high-frequency circuit 17 into digital baseband signals.
In order to implement the above function, the BBAs 20 amplify signals output from the high-frequency circuit 17 and add the amplified parallel signals together, on a per reception-ch basis. The BPFs 13 limit the bands of the signals amplified by the BBAs 20. The signals having the bands limited by the BPFs 13 are transmitted to the ADCs 14.
The ADCs 14 convert analog signals output from the BPFs 13 into digital values. In a case where the high-frequency signal output from the VCO 5 is a down-chirp signal, ADC data is acquired in a section where frequency decreases in a constant slope as illustrated in
The FIRs 15 perform band limitation and decimation processing on digital signals provided by the ADCs 14. The digital baseband signals subjected to the band limitation and the decimation processing are transmitted to the MCU 19.
Using the baseband signals output from the baseband circuit 18, the MCU 19 performs arithmetic processing for obtaining radar information such as a distance to a target, a relative speed of the target, and a direction of the target. This arithmetic processing is performed by the FFTs 16.
The operation of the BBA 20 will be described in more detail. In the BBA 20, the NB PCAs 11 amplify voltages of the same reception signals output from the MIX 4. The adder 12 sums the individual signals output from the PCAs 11. The input impedance of each BBA 20 is set sufficiently larger than the output impedance of the corresponding MIX 4. As a result, the BBA 20 operates as a voltage amplifier. The input impedance of the BBA 20 is 5 kΩ, for example. Furthermore, the output impedance of the MIX 4 is 50Ω, for example.
The phases of reception beat signals output from the individual NB PCAs 11 correlate with each other. For this reason, the adder 12 performs voltage addition of the reception beat signals output from the individual PCAs 11. Meanwhile, noise generated in each of the NB PCAs 11 is mainly thermal noise, flicker noise, etc. These types of noise have no correlation with each other. For this reason, the noises generated in the individual PCAs 11 are subjected to power addition in the adder 12. Thus, the parallel reception beat signals to be added together by the adder 12 each have a higher voltage intensity than noise. As a result, the reception SNR of the BBA 20 is improved in proportion to the parallel addition number of the PCAs 11.
As described above, the radar apparatus 100 according to the embodiment includes no LNA between the reception antennas 1 and the MIXs 4, as illustrated in
The effect of improving an SNR in the BBA 20 will be further described quantitatively with reference to FIG. 3.
Note that the assumption is that the input-referred noises en in the individual PCAs 11 in the BBA 20 are all equal. That is, en=en1=en2= . . . =en10.
PCA input voltage level of reception beat signal: SIN
In
Note that, in a case where the input noise of the BBA 20 is negligibly smaller than the input-referred noise of the BBA 20, the degree of improvement “ASNR” of the reception SNR can be expressed as generalized formula (A) below for any given parallel addition number NB on the basis of the relationship of
ΔSNR=10×log(NB) (A)
As described above, the radar apparatus 100 according to the embodiment is configured to add together the parallel signals, using the PCAs 11 and the adder 12, thereby achieving the effect of improving the reception SNR. Furthermore, the radar apparatus 100 according to the embodiment can achieve the effect of enabling the parallel addition number to control the degree of improvement of the reception SNR.
Note that
Furthermore, the high-frequency circuit 17, the baseband circuit 18, and the MCU 19 have been described as individual circuits in
In addition,
The ROM 85 stores programs for various processes and databases to be referred to in the various processes. The programs and the databases may be recorded in a readable and writable recording medium other than the ROM 85. The recording medium may be a hard disk device, or may be any of a compact disc read only memory (CD-ROM), a digital versatile disc (DVD), and a universal serial bus (USB) memory that are portable recording media. Alternatively, the recording medium may be a flash memory that is a semiconductor memory.
The programs are loaded into the RAM 84. The CPU 82 executes various processes by deploying the programs in the program storage area in the RAM 84 and exchanging necessary information via the input/output unit 83. The data storage area in the RAM 84 is a work area for execution of the various processes. The function of the MCU 19 described above is implemented using the CPU 82.
As described above, the baseband circuit of the radar apparatus according to the embodiment includes: a baseband amplifier that amplify reception signals output from the high-frequency circuit and add the amplified parallel reception signals together, on a per reception-channel basis; and an analog-to-digital converter that converts an analog signal output from the baseband amplifier into a digital value. With this configuration, the radar apparatus can obtain the effect of improving the reception SNR of the entire apparatus without providing the high-frequency circuit with a low noise amplifier.
Note that the configurations set forth in the above embodiment show examples, and it is possible to combine the configurations with another known technique, and is also possible to partially omit or change the configurations without departing from the scope of the present disclosure.
Filing Document | Filing Date | Country | Kind |
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PCT/JP2020/037770 | 10/5/2020 | WO |