Ultra-Low Power Short-Range 60-GHz FMCW Radar Front-End

The millimeter wave (mmWave) frequency band is becoming very interesting over the past years because it provides the opportunity to operate using large bandwidths which are not available at lower frequencies. This enables new communication standards supporting high data rate and enhances the performance of radar and sensing applications. This work focuses on frequency-modulated continuous-wave (FMCW) radars. The operating bandwidth is the unlicensed ISM band between 57 and 64 GHz. Having a high carrier frequency and multi-GHz bandwidth it provides a high range and angular resolution. The target applications are short-range sensing as vital sign monitoring and gesture recognition, and the overall target is to achieve a low-power radar-on-chip (RoC) which is not available in the market yet, current devices consume in the order of few Watts since they are mainly for automotive industry. My contribution for this project is to design the RF front-end which comprises the transmit (TX) and receive (RX) chain, starting from a system level design and going down to specific blocks as power amplifiers, low-noise amplifiers, and mixers. One of the biggest challenges is to efficiently design all these RF blocks having to cover several GHz bandwidth while consuming few mW. Furthermore, several features for improving measurements accuracy are investigated and planned to be implemented, as leakage cancellation and anti-interference techniques. Finally, the opportunity to work with advanced nodes as GF 22nm FDSOI which provides a high maximum frequency enables stable operating circuits in the 60 GHz band.