A Low-Power V-Band Radar Transceiver Front-End Chip Using 1.5 V Supply in 130-nm SiGe BiCMOS

Energy-efficient, low-voltage, and low-power millimeter-wave (mm-wave) radars are gaining increasing attention for battery-powered commercial applications. In this article, the design of a low-power V-band radar sensor based on a transceiver (TRX) front-end chip using 1.5 V supply in an advanced SiGe BiCMOS technology with 300 GHz f(T) and 500 GHz f(max) is presented. The monostatic front-end chip utilizes low-voltage low-power circuit-level design techniques to achieve measured 9-dBm transmitter (TX) output power and 27-dB receiver (RX) gain with a simulated 3.8-dB noise figure (NF) consuming a total of only 72 mW in continuous mode. The TRX chip is used to build a radar sensor, which is experimentally verified in an anechoic chamber. The low-power sensor achieves a 46-dB dynamic range and a ranging precision better than 3.4 mu m measured with a static target at 1 m. Phase measurements using the low-power radar in the continuous-wave (CW) mode demonstrate that submillimeter movements can be tracked, and notably main vital parameters of a human can be determined accurately. Experimental results show that the performance of the proposed low-power TRX front-end chip is very competitive with designs in modern CMOS technologies.