Short-Range Leakage Cancelation in FMCW Radar Transceivers Using an Artificial On-Chip Target

A major drawback of frequency modulated continuous-wave (FMCW) radar systems is the permanent leakage from the transmit into the receive path. Besides leakage within the radar device itself, signal reflections from a fixed object in front of the antennas additionally introduce so-called short-range (SR) leakage. It causes a strong degradation of detection sensitivity due to the unpreventable phase noise of the transmit oscillator. In this work, we introduce an artificial on-chip target (OCT) to mitigate the SR leakage. The OCT consists of a delay line whose time delay is significantly smaller than the round-trip delay time of the SR leakage. This is motivated by the fact that in integrated circuits for automotive radar applications operating at 77 GHz delay lines in the range of only a few picoseconds can be realized with a reasonable amount of circuitry. Despite this constraint, we show that the proposed method achieves almost perfect cancelation of the SR leakage. The concept is based on the cross-correlation properties of the residual phase noise in the intermediate frequency (IF) domain. Further, the effectiveness of the proposed method is verified in an FMCW radar system simulation. It almost perfectly shows that a gain in sensitivity of approximately 6 dB is achieved, compensating for the performance degradation caused by the SR leakage. The novel leakage cancelation concept is carried out mainly in the digital domain enabling high flexibility and adaptivity.