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Technology Hardware

Radar/Wireless Transmitter on a Chip 121

dganapa writes "Researchers at the California Institute of Technology, headed by Dr. Ali Hajimiri, have developed a low-cost radar system on a silicon chip. The entire system has been designed from the ground up on silicon, thus leading to reduced cost as well as robustness in response to design variations and changes in environment. The chip runs at a staggering speed of24 GHz (enabling it to transfer data as fast as the main network of the Internet) and can soon lift wireless, high-frequency communication to a whole new level. The radar as such is not as powerful as a conventional radar but because of its cost-effectiveness, a number of them can be coupled together to perform really well. A related NY Times article is here. A recent article from Slashdot shows that radar technology is increasingly being implemented in the automobile industry. This current chip is sure to be much more successful than its predecessors as far as the automobile industry is concerned, but whether or not its processing speed will become important in the computer industry remains to be seen."
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Radar/Wireless Transmitter on a Chip

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  • by mattjb0010 ( 724744 ) on Saturday February 28, 2004 @08:03AM (#8416010) Homepage
    The chip runs at a staggering speed of24 GHz (enabling it to transfer data as fast as the main network of the Internet)

    How many Libraries of Congress is that?
    • I don't know, but I for one am looking forward to my Soliton Radar System that will be coupled with my Codec.
      • Seriously enough, could this be used to create an Auto-Drive system for cars? It'd be nice to just lie back and go to sleep while driving a car and not worry about dying.
        • by larkost ( 79011 ) on Saturday February 28, 2004 @09:16AM (#8416192)
          It could be a component, but only one piece. The really tough part if creating the software that intelligently drives. There are so many oddball cases you have to deal with in driving that it will be a very long time before this is possible.

          Look how much trouble the teams are having putting together vehicles to race each other at 30 MPH on a closed course in the DARPA challenge. Many of them are using radar in conjunction with laser and visual systems in order to put together a world-view, and they are still having major problems running a course without other drivers.

          Now add in all the erratic drivers, random animals, and kids running out into streets, and I don't think we are even close to having self-driving cars.
          • I suppose the really tough part of anti-lock brakes or air-bags is 'creating the software'..

            This is just another component like those two innovations. It's not intended to drive around like George Jetson.
          • by BigBlockMopar ( 191202 ) on Saturday February 28, 2004 @11:13AM (#8416667) Homepage

            It could be a component, but only one piece. The really tough part if creating the software that intelligently drives. There are so many oddball cases you have to deal with in driving that it will be a very long time before this is possible.

            I don't think the goal is that loft at this point - we're talking about an aid for the (human) driver to see through fog.

            Quoted from the first line of the article:

            Imagine driving down a twisty mountain road on a dark foggy night. Visibility is near-zero, yet you still can see clearly. Not through your windshield, but via an image on a screen in front of you.

            This would be nearly impossible to implement by radar alone, but this is a step towards it.

            The problem, of course, is clutter. Fog, snow and rain all obscure your view through radar because of clutter and attenuation. Even with a very intelligent algorithm combining the skills of hundreds of experienced mariners, finding the sweet spot on the clutter and gain controls is difficult.

            Another issue is "obstructions" which won't cause an echo at all - like the very big fall waiting for you on the other side of the missing guardrail.

            Let's consider a worst-case scenario. It's raining. The gain and clutter are configured to give you a clear view of cars in front of you, guardrails, concrete obstructions, rocks, etc despite the driving rain.

            A few minutes ago, a truck drove down the road and a forklift pallet of toilet paper fell off the truck. Do you think your radar is going to show you its echo? I think its relatively weak echo will be filtered out as clutter...

            How about something more substantial, a big square rooftop HVAC unit sitting on the road, one of its four corners pointed directly at you? Even under the best possible circumstances, it's going to be very hard to get an echo off that, since there isn't a surface normal to the RF energy leaving your car...

            Or a kid, wandering around the road. Daddy had an accident because he trusted too much in his automotive radar system, and has been hurt. The clutter on your own radar system is set high enough to obsure the echoes from the water droplets of the driving rainstorm. Now, what kind of echo are we going to get off a human being, considering that we're mostly water?

            I've seen people on radar systems. You really don't see much, and I don't care whether it's X-band or S-band, a crappy little Furuno bought at the yacht club or a $200,000 interswitched Lloyds type-approved Racal-Decca ARPA radar used on an aircraft carrier. You're still not gonna see much of a target.

            While I was designing radar video systems for Litton (before the tech collapse), we had constant reports that bridge crews were using the radar for navigation, rather than properly sighting, having crew on watch, and bringing the ship to a slow speed with due consideration of conditions.

            The ship's captain probably has 20 years experience at sea, and is now in charge of a multi-million dollar vehicle with many lives on board. These are responsible, intelligent and experienced people. And they often take their radar's accuracy for granted.

            How, then, are we going to get Joe Sixpack who currently thinks nothing of driving around in his SUV, cellphone planted to his ear, to understand that the radar image presented to him is NOT infallible? That it is, despite its ability to "see" through fog, snow and rain, actually less accurate than the human eye?

            Hell, how are we even going to teach him to read the display? With several years of experience reading PPI radar displays, there's no way in hell that I would ever try to use it (or just a quadrant sweep) to drive a car. It's just not as intuitive as it would seem, and I can't even begin to imagine what sort of work would be required to try to create something like a TV picture of the road ahead.

            First off, to scan the image, the transceiver's antenna would have to be scanned - physically moved around - at the same speed as the desired refresh rate of the

            • Fascinating post. You sound like you have a pretty good idea about radar. I only have one quibble....

              First off, to scan the image, the transceiver's antenna would have to be scanned - physically moved around - at the same speed as the desired refresh rate of the image.

              At the bottom of the article he mentions that these things are used as a phased array. You don't have to mechanically scan the antenna. This allows you very rapid switching. As for rates, lets say that you want a 1k by 1k image at 10 Hz.

        • Haven't you checked out BMW and Mercs recent radar cruise controllers? BMW one is especially snazzy.
    • Approximately Three WV Beetles
    • by frazzydee ( 731240 ) on Saturday February 28, 2004 @08:59AM (#8416134)
      I'm not completely sure, but this [internetnews.com] site says that BellSouth's backbone could download the library of congress in 126 seconds- so it's gotta be pretty fast.
  • by Anthony Boyd ( 242971 ) on Saturday February 28, 2004 @08:06AM (#8416016) Homepage
    The radar as such is not as powerful as a conventional radar but because of its cost-effectiveness, a number of them can be coupled together to perform really well.

    Imagine a beowulf... oh nevermind. :)

  • by MrRTFM ( 740877 ) * on Saturday February 28, 2004 @08:11AM (#8416026) Journal
    (yes - of course we can disable it if we want to)
    but wouldn't it be great to have the brakes applied if you lose attention for that one split second. Everyone I've known who has been in a car accident, (luckily they were minor) has said just that.

    Unless you are James Bond, or just want to do some fancy driving a radar controlled braking system would be great.
    • by gnugie ( 757363 ) on Saturday February 28, 2004 @09:33AM (#8416268)
      Both Cadillac and Jaguar sell vehicles with Radar-based Adaptive Cruise Control, which will brake for you if needed.

      Check out the Cadillac XLR.
    • I think the aircraft-transponder-alike is much better, each device is given a unique id and beeping using omnidirectional antenna. Well, may be how to determine location, speed can be figured out during the development process.
    • but wouldn't it be great to have the brakes applied if you lose attention for that one split second.

      Only if the dumbass sitting on your tail also has radar braking...
    • The only collision that anyone I know has ever been in had nothing to do with inattention - it was my dad, and he was driving along a slick road when he came to the results of a former crash that had sent another one car skidding across the road (the other was an 18 wheeler, it just shrugged and kept going). There was no way that he could have avoided the crash - the best he could do was aim for the empty passenger side and pray. Sometimes, no matter what you do, attention (electronic-aided or otherwise)
    • by SuperBanana ( 662181 ) on Saturday February 28, 2004 @10:54AM (#8416607)
      but wouldn't it be great to have the brakes applied if you lose attention for that one split second. Everyone I've known who has been in a car accident, (luckily they were minor) has said just that.

      As someone who volunteers at his car club's high-speed driver education events and has attended one of the events as a student- um, no.

      First, braking is NOT always the best choice. When you're doing 60 and a moose jumps out in front of you, you STEER, not BRAKE. Why? Because under about 200 feet, you're never going to stop in time but you probably can change lanes. Simple physics tell you why- it's a lot easier to accelerate a car enough to move 10 feet to the side than it is to bring the whole thing to a stop.

      Second, when said moose jumps out in front of you, steering while braking is exactly what causes many accidents, because you unbalance the car, shift a huge amount of weight to one corner tire, which becomes drastically deformed under the weight and becomes nearly useless; meanwhile, there's next to no weight on any of the other tires, and they're useless too. Your tires have what is called a "friction circle"; draw an X-Y axis, now a circle centered. That describes how much acceleration your tire can accomplish in any one direction. Notice that there's less of any one particular axis when you're doing both? Your tires always stop better when you're not trying to steer, and vise-versa. Both controls should ALWAYS remain under control of the driver so the system doesn't try to do something while you're doing something else.

      Third, proper driver education is a lot cheaper(just one $200-300 event, depending on the club, will teach you quite a bit about how to handle your car properly) in the long run.

      Your friends who have been in accidents need to analyze WHY they got into the accidents they did. I'm guessing an automatic braking system would not have "fixed" any of this, but better attentiveness, good judgment, and proper knowledge of how to handle their car would have.

      • This guy speaks truth. I once attempted to brake and veer around a family of raccoons crossing the road late at night. The end result was I killed the raccoons anyway (an entire family :-( ) and my car ended up pointed the wrong way on the opposite side of the street, twenty yards down. A few more feet per second of initial velocity and I would've ended up wrapped around a phone pole.

        Since then I don't so much as tap the breaks for anything weighing under 100 pounds. The lives of little crawly critters ar


      • That sounds like good advice for race track conditions, but for some reason I think that on a two lane road, I would like to have the brakes on rather than swerving into oncoming traffic...
      • I agree. As someone who has spent a lot of time driving excessively fast, I can't imagine that any kind of automatic system could account for human experience, and familiarity with your vehicle. When I buy a new car, I tend to spend quite a bit of time learning how far I can push its limits so that I know how it will handle when I'm clipping along at 80 and Bambi suddenly wants to get up close and personal with my grill.

        As I said, I sometimes drive excessively fast, and occasionally I have gotten in wrec
  • by tota ( 139982 ) on Saturday February 28, 2004 @08:15AM (#8416034) Homepage
    The arcticle is a little light on technical details, is 24Ghz the speed of the chip or the frequency used to scan/send the data?


    Why can't I get my liquid nitrogen cooled 24 Ghz ahtlon64 then? I thought we weren't capable of making gates that would switch that fast?


    Can someone clear up my confusion?

    • Frequency. (Score:3, Informative)

      by Jack Zombie ( 637548 )
      A related NY Times article is here [nytimes.com].
      • And if you read the article, you would know that it is a little lite on the details... and the parent question is valid. One of the articles implies that this chip is a panacea solution to computing problems.

        I think that the article writers don't understand technology well enough, and the 24Ghz is the radio frequency only. I would bet that the processing center is much slower.
    • by Ancient_Hacker ( 751168 ) on Saturday February 28, 2004 @09:02AM (#8416146)
      24GHz is the frequency of the radar signal, which determines the radar's spatial resulution. It's not the data rate, that's an inapt analogy. BTW it's unlikely an automatic braking system will be easy to design-- The rate of false positives is likely to be much too high. Small objects that are near a half-wavelength in size are likely to give strong reflections. So common road objects like pebbles, lane dots, falling rain, are likely to generate an exceedingly high screech-the-brakes rate.
      • by Anonymous Coward
        Small objects that are near a half-wavelength in size are likely to give strong reflections. So common road objects like pebbles, lane dots, falling rain, are likely to generate an exceedingly high screech-the-brakes rate.

        With the phases array, they should be able to measure the side of the object. Of course you are right that a cloud of pebbles could cause braking, but that might be ok.

        • Measuring the size of the object isn't enough.

          If a car started braking over a cloud of pebbles, no one would use the features.

          Current radar-based cruise-control technologies have to do things like measure the targets, determine the speed (and direction) of the targets, and determine if the target is legitimate. Then, the system must determine when/how to throttle the engine and when/how to apply the brakes.

          Basically, the radar's the easy part.

          And it's not something that costs millions of dollars, eithe
      • by timeOday ( 582209 ) on Saturday February 28, 2004 @10:36AM (#8416540)
        BTW it's unlikely an automatic braking system will be easy to design...
        Easy or not, I don't know. But Daimler first put radar-controlled braking for cruise control into Mercedes in 1998 [findarticles.com]. I have ridden in a demonstration, and the system doesn't just shut off the cruise control when you come up on another car - it can hit the brakes quite hard. And apparently this is old news for trucks [dougbedell.com] too:
        American big-rig truck fleets are much further along. More than 10,000 trucks on highways are outfitted with radar-based collision-warning systems that alert drivers to fast-approaching danger and induce braking. Data collected over millions of miles shows the systems have reduced accident rates by 70 percent or more.

    • Just guessing: The radar signal is generated by a microwave oscillator formed by some kind of folded structure on the silicon. The structure must be folded because it must be at least one wavelength of the generated frequency. The wavelength of a 24 GigaHertz signal is:

      (300,000,000 meters/second [the speed of light, approx.]) / (24,000,000,000 cycles/second [24 GHz]) = 0.0125 meters, or a wavelength of 1.25 centimeters.

      In photos, the radar chips are shown to be less than 1.25 centimeters in width
      • - The chip here is not "a major breakthrough".
        - The system here can be easily accomplished with two or three chips today.
        - The interesting thing here is a single CMOS chip implementation.
        - The VCO is probably a DVCO (distributed voltage-controlled oscillator) [this aspect of the design might be considered a design major breakthrough].
        - Things don't have to be "at least one wavelength".. In MMIC design you might care about 1/2 a wavelength... but regardless the antennas are off-chip anyways. And this
        • " The interesting thing here is a single CMOS chip implementation. "
          brActually, they used a SiGe BiCMOS process from IBM
        • "The VCO is probably a DVCO (distributed voltage-controlled oscillator) [this aspect of the design might be considered a design major breakthrough]."

          They used a 16-phase 19GHz VCO made up of 8 tuned CNOS differential amplifiers
      • by zerobeat ( 628744 ) on Saturday February 28, 2004 @11:17AM (#8416673) Homepage
        It is indeed possible for a device to generate radio frequency with a wavelength greater than the devices physical size. A typical AM station generates a signal at a wavelength 600 meters to about 200 meters. Most AM stations do not have antennas this long and their transmitter boxes certainly aren't this size.

        Frequencies can theorectically be generated with any size circuitry. Im pretty sure this circuit does so using the so called Phase Locked Loop (PLL) circuit, possibly mixing 2 or more together to get the very very very very high frequency by addition. This circuit does not require wire coils (often of relatively large size) to resonate at these "really" high frequencies. There would need to be a filtering step (or two or three) and I can see how this circuit would be hard to miniturize, but I guess they have done it!

        Typically for a radio signal to be radiated you need at least a half wavelength antenna but even this can be cheated at. In the microwave region where this device is working at, signals are best radiated using a "dish" type antenna. This chip no doubt does not come with this dish. It simply generates the rf at 24 GHz.

        ZBeat
        • In the microwave region where this device is working at, signals are best radiated using a "dish" type antenna. This chip no doubt does not come with this dish.

          The article specifically states that the chip implements a phased-array of antennas. And that those antennas are actually physically on the chip itself.

          This is one reason why this solution will be cheap to implement - it does ALL the RF work for you, you simply connect "a computer" to the resultant datastream and interpret it how you like.
      • The chip has most likely has an onboard frequency synthesizer with an LC tank VCO generating the LO to generate the 24 GHz RF Output using a mixer. This can all be done using the latest SiGe technology, or GaAs or InP technologies.
    • Radar chip is 24GHz (Score:5, Informative)

      by glassesmonkey ( 684291 ) on Saturday February 28, 2004 @09:08AM (#8416168) Homepage Journal
      I found the NYTimes article dumbed things down a little too much. Basically, this is a press release by a fairly young professor about a ISSCC paper to be presented next week.

      CMOS is getting fast enough (could be SiGe BiCMOS chip but probably CMOS) to allow for amplifiers and ADC (analog-to-digital) that work in the radar (~25GHz on up) range & also allows for million gate DSPs and digital logic on the same chip. The analog front-end is running around 24GHz which gives a 1/4 wavelength around 3mm (antennas are implemented as PCB traces off-chip). This is an analog GHz signal where the transistors are amplifying a tiny GHz signal using analog amplifiers. Digital clock speeds are completely different. Digital is like switching completely from off to on (ie. 0 to 5V -- in reality try 2V or 3.3V). This is like a uV signal being amplified to be later converted to a digital signal with a more reasonable bandwidth that a digital CPU could handle (like your overclocked Pentium).

      The parallel analog antennas & blocks which allows for parallel ADC of 8 channels.. 8 parallel radar antennas. By using parallel processing you can use the information gained by the other channels to improve your ADC or have each channel only need to work at 1/8 of the total speed. Also, having 8 antennas allows phased arrays where you can control the beam and allows you to scan the beam or block out other signals (much like cell towers can focus in on one cell signal, and why your 802.11 router has two antennas). So, depending on how much bandwidth the ADCs need & how fast the DSP is running is really the 'digital' GHz part of the chip. So the digital processing is probably a more reasonable 100's of MHz (though hard to compare DSP speed to CPU speed). The processed digital waveform can be sent high-speed off chip, or to on-chip CPU to be used to disable your cruise-control and hit the brakes for you.

      Why do you care? Well by using straight CMOS the radar system can be made on one chip and not need 'exotic' GaAs/SiGe/InP (BJTs of traditional radar systems) and when the automotive chips get down to sub-$5 they will show up in every car. Also doing it this way, much smaller power is involved and you don't need circuits that look like your microwave oven waveguides.
      • "CMOS is getting fast enough (could be SiGe BiCMOS chip but probably CMOS) to allow for amplifiers and ADC (analog-to-digital) that work in the radar (~25GHz on up)"

        They used an IBM SiGe proces according to my ISSCC digest
    • 24 GHz would be a cycle time of 41.7 ps. For just about everyone, that's longer than the setup time plus hold time of a flop, making it impossible to do any logic in any given cycle. There is also the possibility of only listening to every other clock, but then it really wouldn't be 12 ghz.

      Unless someone's at least ten years ahead in tech out there?
      • " 24 GHz would be a cycle time of 41.7 ps. For just about everyone, that's longer than the setup time plus hold time of a flop, making it impossible to do any logic in any given cycle. There is also the possibility of only listening to every other clock, but then it really wouldn't be 12 ghz. "

        They use a Sige process from IBM, from which it is possiible to make a 24 GHz mixer and divder.
    • Judging by some of Hajimiri's "selected works" (for example, "A 24 GHz CMOS Front End" [caltech.edu]), it appears that they're talking about the carrier frequency, not the data rate. Of course, higher carrier frequency generally implies more bandwidth, but this isn't a wireless 24 Gbps backbone.
    • Why can't I get my liquid nitrogen cooled 24 Ghz ahtlon64 then? I thought we weren't capable of making gates that would switch that fast?

      Your CPU has paths more than one gate long that have to switch each cycle. Even if you DID design a processor with 1 gate per pipeline stage, you'd still need more than 41ps just for the clock-to-q (time it takes the data to come out of a flip flop) and setup of the next flop (time before the clock arrives that the data needs to be valid).
  • by rusty0101 ( 565565 ) on Saturday February 28, 2004 @08:15AM (#8416036) Homepage Journal
    ... and no I haven't read the article yet.

    can an array of these be used to emulate a synthetic apreture radar, meaning that a flat panel gives you a 120 to 180 degree field of view from that panel?

    Can the processing power of the chips be used to provide an improved image of what is reflecting in the spectrum the radar is working in? With a two dimensional array of 5 by 5 chips, distributed over a 1 foot by 1 foot surface, you could have a 3 dimensional "image" with a resolution similar to a human's 2 eyes. If the chips themselves can be programmed to do the interpolation, you could use a seprate computer to provide a opengl real time image of the world.

    Perhaps I should read the article...

    -Rusty
    • by Anonymous Coward
      can an array of these be used to emulate a synthetic apreture radar, meaning that a flat panel gives you a 120 to 180 degree field of view from that panel?

      ONE Of these chips can. It's a phased array (aka synthetic aperature) radar on a single chip.

      ...provide an improved image...

      Probably. Researchers were doing this with hydrophones picking up background noise 5 years ago (sorry, I don't have a link, I read it in Scientific American)

    • .....Attaching tin-foil hat......How long before we have to report to re-education centers to have these transmitters placed in our brains....or maybe its already happened!!!!
  • by G4from128k ( 686170 ) on Saturday February 28, 2004 @08:18AM (#8416044)
    This same technology could be used for low-cost RFID scanners. If manufacturers can bundle an entire RFID interrogator on a silicon chip, it would reduce scanner costs and accelerate RFID adoption. The low power of this silicon-based GHz RF would be acceptable in many RFID scanning applications.
    • I think you would want an omni-directional model first.
    • The problem with this RFID concept is the price to adoption is in the $0.10 range which is a hard thing to do. Also the antennas for these are like 3" long pieces of plastic.

      I don't see what having a strong RF field generator on chip does? See, how they work is low/no power needed on-chip which is then excited by RF field and the chip replies with a signal which identifies it. What good does an on-chip "interrogator" do? And how exactly does help this adoption along?
  • Sounds like fun... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Dark Lord Seth ( 584963 ) on Saturday February 28, 2004 @08:19AM (#8416046) Journal

    ... having radar in your car. Just don't be surprised one the police finds a way to screw you over for a few more bucks by using passive radar to determine your speed.

    • Just don't be surprised one the police finds a way to screw you over for a few more bucks by using passive radar to determine your speed. If you dont want the police to charge you for speeding, stop going over the limit
      • Good point, but over here you get screwed over if you even go 4 kmh ( roughly 2,5 mph ) over the limit. They don't care if you're overtaking at the moment or not. Besides, the police are supposed to keep speeding under control where relevant, not where it is most profitable.

        It's quite a riot over here in the NL, where our goverment and police ( on all levels ) are practically conspiring against people with cars. Instead of maintaining control at essential points where people might actually be in danger fr

        • ...you've lost EUR 23 to some idiot dressed in blue.

          Which reminds me of little story:
          A man was driving pretty fast over a bridge when he was stopped by a cop.
          What's the hurry?
          I'm late for work.
          What kind of work do you do?
          I'm a doctor. I stretch assholes.
          Say what??
          Yes, I stretch assholes out to about 6 feet.
          What do you do with a 6 foot asshole?
          Give him a radar gun and put him on the end of a bridge.
    • You bring up a very good point. With a simple radar detector, cops will be able to "see" you coming for miles. They'll probably legally have to using an active measuring system to "clock" you, but it can be completely automated, and they can nap in between suckers^H^H^H erm, taxpayers.
  • by G4from128k ( 686170 ) on Saturday February 28, 2004 @08:28AM (#8416070)
    * The chip could serve as the brains inside a robot capable of vacuuming your house. While such appliances now exist, a vacuum using Hajimiri's chip as its brain would clean without constantly bumping into everything, have the sense to stay out of your way, and never suck up the family cat.

    Not really. The radar might reflect off the cat or your leg, but would pass right through wooden furniture and walls. A radar-equipped vacuum cleaner would still bump into stuff.

    * A chip the size of a thumbnail could be placed on the roof of your house, replacing the bulky satellite dish or the cable connections for your DSL. Your picture could be sharper, and your downloads lightning fast.

    Wrong on size. Satellite dishes are big to both help collect enough RF energy to get a clean signal and to pinpoint on a single satellite. Without the needed collecting area and beam-forming span of the antenna, the signal would be weak and overlaid with signals from other satellites in orbit.
    • by Garak ( 100517 ) <chris@noSPAM.insec.ca> on Saturday February 28, 2004 @08:46AM (#8416109) Homepage Journal
      Yea, who ever wrote this article has no clue what they are talking about...

      Hajimiri's chip runs at 24 GHz (24 billion cycles in one second), an extremely high speed, which makes it possible to transfer data wirelessly at speeds available only to the backbone of the Internet (the main network of connections that carry most of the traffic on the Internet

      24GHz is just the operating frequency not the bandwidth. You do have alot of free bandwidth, free is in not sold already, but your still not going to get close to OC-192 speeds. The most rf bandwidth your going to get is maybe 500 Mhz and with 802.11g tech your getting around 20mbit of useable bandwidth out of 6Mhz. So (500/6)*20 = 1666, thats 1.67 gbit, not bad, but nowhere close to backbone speeds of 12gbit.

      This technology could replace the dish, but it won't be the size of your thumbnail. A phased array could be used to obtain a fare amount of gain with a 12x12" panel.
    • Not to be paranoid here but doesn't all this extra stray RF concern anyone? It's been proven that excessive radar signal was the cause of excessive cancer rates in some state troopers. True, those radar guns might have been a *bit* more powerful than what's being described here. Maybe the total exposure is dangerous like the great George Carlin once said, "...but only when swallowed in small amounts over a long period of time."

      It's not that I'm concerned so much about one or two of these things. It's the c
  • by tlk nnr ( 449342 ) on Saturday February 28, 2004 @08:31AM (#8416076) Homepage
    Is the frequency band at 24 GHz actually licensed for automotive radar systems?
    According to this press release [bmwnation.com] it's not licensed in parts of Europe.
    And in the US, there is only a temporary license.
    I haven't found an unbiased summary yet - the referenced press release is from a working group of companies in the automotive industry.
    This summary [etsi.org] says that the frequence is reserved for radio astronomy and similar users.
  • by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 28, 2004 @08:31AM (#8416077)
    This will make those radar detectors (used to detect police radars in speed traps) virtually useless. Once every car is equipped with a radar, these detectors will beep continuously.

    Maybe they can be replaced with very sensitive tri-sensor devices that test for a specific combination of: doughnuts, coffee, and bacon.
  • Resolution (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Mr. Underhill ( 119443 ) on Saturday February 28, 2004 @08:31AM (#8416078)
    If my early morning math is right the wave length of 24Ghz is about half an inch. Does that mean that the chip could distinguish distances as small as half an inch?

    That would be really cool for a small robot if it could.
    • Re:Resolution (Score:4, Informative)

      by chang3 ( 111753 ) on Saturday February 28, 2004 @09:11AM (#8416178)
      Well, looks like your math is right. But the resoultion of a radar is mainly determined by its bandwidth, not the carrier frequency. i.e. Shorter pulse = larger bandwidth = higher bandwidth.
    • Re:Resolution (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      You can distinguish ranges smaller than the wave length. You can't see objects, details, etc that are smaller than the wave length.

      For the first you are just measuring time of flight and can look at the phase of the return signal to really pin things down. For the second, if it's too small, the radar doesn't even bounce off.

  • Hype (Score:5, Interesting)

    by John Hasler ( 414242 ) on Saturday February 28, 2004 @09:05AM (#8416154) Homepage
    The chip is neat, but the article is very heavy on the hype. The only new thing here is putting everything including the antenna on one chip.

    And conventional radars do not cost "millions of dollars".
    • Re:Hype (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      The only new thing here is putting everything including the antenna on one chip.

      Funny. The article I read says the antennas are on the PCB. What's new is they used Si, instead of more exotic materials.

    • nothing new (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      It really isn't that new or novel.. Just a PR Prof trying to toot his horn.
  • Traffic monitors (Score:3, Insightful)

    by CCCP4Life ( 444179 ) on Saturday February 28, 2004 @10:47AM (#8416577)
    Imagine placing these chips on top of light poles every 1/2 mile on big city highways. Now enable them to relay information to each other and broadcast it via Bluetooth or something like that.

    In your car have a GPS map that has wireless capability to these units. You can get a real-time traffic density map of the city and decide if you want to take the freeway home or take another route...

    Seems like a pretty easy app to set up also.
    • Re:Traffic monitors (Score:3, Interesting)

      by BillX ( 307153 )
      Imagine placing these chips on top of light poles every 1/2 mile on big city highways. Now enable them to start photographing drivers and license plates whenever excess speeds are detected...
  • Robotics (Score:2, Informative)

    by Zebra_X ( 13249 )
    This will be vitally important to the development of consumer robotics devices and the mitiuraization of existing devices. One of the big problems now with small robots is that they have limited choices for environmental perception. Ultrasound has a limited range and can easily be interfered with, Infared has the same limitations, and optics which is the ideal solution requires a large amount of processing for shape recognition. Ussing radar, longer range, lower interference sensing devices can/will be inco
  • This chip interests me most from the aspect of pulse generation. What sort of circuitry do they have on there that's capable of producing the high-power RF pulses? Have you ever seen the kinds of diodes they use on big military radars? Those things can conduct thousands of amps! They're gigantic. How the hell did they build such a pulsed power system onto an itty bitty chip (yeah, it's definitely smaller scale than the mega-diodes I've seen but it's still impressive).
    • I didn't see anything in the article that referred to power output - maybe I just missed it. But I think that there may be lots of applications where the kind of power you are thinking about isn.t needed, Military units need maximum range, and range is often hundreds of miles. But to spot another car in the fog all you need is a hundred yards or so.

      And the beam-focusing aspect means that 100 mW can go a long way.

      I was thinking that the communications aspect may be the big payoff, think what this would do
  • This comes much too late for Intel and AMD. For the longest time, they had a clockspeed war, and now are in a stalemate.

    This would be the perfect reason to boost clockspeed - if this chip is cheap, fast, and has low power consumption, it would be perfect for wireless networks. In fact, if this chip is as commodized as the article tends to imply, then depending on range it could make ad-hoc networks simple and easy.

    But since it runs at 24 Ghz, even one stream would be too much for a standard server or one
  • There was a big thing in the mid-nineties about Micropower Impule Radar (MIR). Again this was just a kind of radar on a chip. It all sounded great but I recently read that the laboratory involved was being investigated for fraudulent claims. http://golhoeft.addr.com/mirrpt99.htm Lets hope this new work bears fruit.
    • I have played with a variant of this.

      Basically, it was a CMOS "Linear Feedback Shift Register", aka "PseudRandom Sequence Generator" (PSRG) which generated a predictable stream of 1 and 0. The output signal went to both a "D" type flip-flop and the class-C buffer amp which fed the transmit antenna. The idea was not to transmit the levels of the PRSG, but just the edges. Those edges are sharp and transmit well... ( eh, ANY digital edges are sharp and transmit well, and we jump through all sorts of hoops

  • range anyone? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Seahawk91 ( 585715 )
    I know everyone is excited about the chip that uses almost no power to act as a radar. However, unless they re-write a few laws of physics, I thought the range of a radio signal was dependent upon its power with a few other environmental factors thrown in. Did I miss something, or has no one stated the range of this device yet?
  • If they get the HW frequency high enough, couldn't they step it down in software to receive lower frequencies too, DSP the signal to filter for harmonics, and tune in any frequency in the entire band? Is this device the quantum leap to a cheap, tiny, single chip universal antenna?
    • Re:Harmonics (Score:3, Informative)

      by gordguide ( 307383 )
      It's all about the power with radar. So, it's unlikely that a chip that actually manages to get in the right bandwidth to work as radar with the available power it has available is going to have much output below that optimum. I would bet they are using whatever frequency that sits on top of the bell curve, and are happy to have it.

      Transmit; listen; figure out the difference between what you heard and what you should have heard if it went on indefinitely (ie no relfection). Repeat, very quickly.

      The listen
      • That was an illuminating (pun intended :) discussion of radar, our divergence in viewpoints is semantic. Fundamental frequency is the lowest frequency of the vibrations [google.com], but subharmonics are found at the integer fractions of any vibration [google.com]. In perception (at the receiver, whether ear or antenna), the "fundamental" is the dominant (loudest or highest amplitude) received frequency, that "defines" the tone for the apperceptive apparatus (whether auditory cortex or the ESound driver :).

        When I started DSP progra
        • Very interesting stuff, that.

          Semantics indeed. Of course I do know you can synthesize a subharmonic by studying the upper harmonics (lots of relatively inexpensive products do it now and have for a while); it certainly seems to be valuable as an error-correction mechanism.

          I see now you were referring to a system that involves receivers that listen at higher than the fundamental (many times higher, to work right) and then reconstruct what must have been below. For some reason I though your original post wa
          • In the digital domain, terms like "lowest frequency" and "highest frequency" actually have meaning, as noise attenuation in the quantization enforces a nonlinear signal window. But in the "analog" (real) world, any vibration has an infinite series of sub/harmonics. The frequency of impetus impulse (pluck) can be considered a "fundamental", as can be the loudest received frequency (ping), but all the integral sub/super waves exist. So while this radar chip is exciting, I'm interested to see how analog engine
  • After reading Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash a friend and I looked into how hard it would be to make something like the smart wheels on YT's board or on Hiro's bike. It really just came down to having a really accurate map of what was in front of you. So low power cheap accurate radar would be ideal. Of course you still need something that can pulse one of the spokes like 18/sec at just 60 miles an hour but hey why not...
  • Body Aura-mour (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    From David Syes

    I think I coined this first: Body Aura-Mour...

    Imagine this being used on soldiers' ensembles... you could wear a weapons system that tags friends' IFF transponders to reduce fratricided (accidental or intentional, to prevend fragging the 2/LT);

    It could be used to locate and link up with allies, or to sneak up on unsuspecting targets in almost any kind of weather.

    Moreover, it could help police and firefighters. Ever more frightening, school kids could me made to rent them and affix them to
  • by TakeIT2 ( 757419 )
    Well, in about 15 years at least...

    To get a licenced vehicle it will have to have a similar chip in it, pointing at the ground below the car 2 feet from the cars edge. The car will report the speed to you and the cops. No high speed chases, just a ticket or summons in your mail box, maybe it will even triggar an auto-funds-debit (no pun intended.) Forget self driving daydreams, the reason we like to drive is autonomy (again no pun.) Even futuristicly, self driving is a luxury add-on, that this chip might
    • If the ground is two feet away from you and approaching at speed, you're falling and about to die.

      RADAR doesn't track "the speed" of an object, but actually only measures its distance (and we get the {relative} speed by calculating change in distance over time).

      RADAR is probably going to have a hard time giving you the speed of what amounts to an infinitely large something which is a constant distance from you.

      And while we're at it, because it's only tracking distance, and you're looking "at the ground,
  • "This current chip is sure to be much more successful than its predecessors as far as the automobile industry is concerned, but whether or not its processing speed will become important in the computer industry remains to be seen."

    24GHz is an FCC assigned band for automoive radar. The processing speed isn't the issue since the radar signal is mixed down to extract the basesband info, which is processed at a much slower rate. 24 GHz is significant since phased array antennas at this frequency are getting sm
  • "The chip runs at a staggering speed of24 GHz (enabling it to transfer data as fast as the main network of the Internet) and can soon lift wireless, high-frequency communication to a whole new level."

    24GHz is the carrier frequency of the radar. The amount of information in a signal is related to the bandwidth of the signal, as well as linearity and noise. This design was done in SIGe BiCMOS, which is more than capable of designing a wireless tranceiver at 24Ghz RF frequency. The phased-array signals are mi
  • I am not smart enough to fully appreciate all of the applications that a chip of this nature could perform but after reading the article, I am still wondering what it really is? Is it something akin to the "one chip calculator" that launched the personal computer revolution - a multi-function device that is versitile enough to do many jobs well? Or is it closer to a GPS on a chip - a device that does one job and does it well - that can be interfaced with other components to do a wide variety of tasks?

    I'm

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