Small RADAR Solution Enhances Vehicle Safety

There are many other advancements happening in vehicles in parallel with the move to electrification. Consumers are demanding more features that enhance the vehicle’s safety and comfort, as well as providing greater infotainment options. Those features include monitoring the performance and environment of the vehicle and its surroundings. The monitoring of the environment outside of the car requires RADAR, Lidar and video sensors, which are vital for collision avoidance. All of these features require advanced electronics, which take up space in the car and add weight. Vehicle makers are therefore pushing electronics manufacturers to provide new products that are smaller and lighter, while still having the ability to offer higher performance and provide more functionality than their predecessors.

To meet those needs, NXP has launched a 3^rd generation of its RF CMOS radar chip technology that will enable more reliable long range object detection. The company claims to be the first to market with a 28nm solution that provides double the radar performance of the previous generation. It also has the capability of 4D sensing, where elevation is added to the three current existing parameters – speed, distance and direction of arrival. In combination with a greater degree of resolution, the solution now offers the capability of identifying separate objects that were previously nearly impossible to distinguish early in the detection cycle, such as a fast moving motorcycle beside a truck. 4D sensing for corner and front radar applications will help manufacturers provide critical safety ADAS applications, such as automated emergency braking, adaptive cruise control, blind-spot monitoring, cross-traffic alert and automated parking. To help process that extra information, the new single chip SAF85xx solution offers a 40% increase in computing power.

Explaining how NXP has responded to the requirements of vehicle manufacturers, Matthias Feulner, Senior Director ADAS at NXP Semiconductors said, “Today’s vehicles have lot more sensors equipped in the vehicle, so space is required to mount them. In addition, OEMs are placing more emphasis on the design features of the vehicle, and these need to be taken into consideration along with the technical capabilities for the chip. Consequently, we need to have a small sensor that can be mounted in tight spaces, for example behind the bumper. The SAF85xx range takes up 30% less space that the previous generation of TEF82xx RF RADAR chips that were launched only last year, and the new family will offer a scalable platform that will allow OEMs to tailor the device to different use cases. It will also allow manufacturers to easily migrate to new zonal architectures”.

The new SAF85xx one-chip family combines high performance radar sensing and processing technologies into a single device to address short, medium and long range radar applications to meet more challenging NCAP safety requirements. The highly integrated 77 GHz radar smart transceiver SoC contains four high-performance transmitters, four receivers, a multi-core radar processor with hardware accelerator, Gigabit Ethernet communication interface and memory. It targets the Automotive Safety Integrity Level B (ASIL B) requirements, according to the ISO 26262 functional safety standard and the automotive cybersecurity standard ISO/SAE 21434 to meet the requirements of the automotive industry for safety and security

Feulner expanded on the new capabilities of the range by saying, “The two times performance increase over the previous generation gives us the ability to support more enhanced sensing use cases, and the 40% compute power increase allow the running of more advanced algorithms, for example to perform multimode operations, where the same sense or performs multiple different functions at once”.

www.nxp.com/saf85xx