What is millimeter wave? -- "Millimeter wave basics" (white paper)

Jacktang

What is millimeter wave? -- "Millimeter wave basics" (white paper) [Copy link]

mmWave is a valuable sensing technology that can be used to detect objects and provide information about their distance, speed and angle. It is a contactless technology that operates in the 30GHz to 300GHz spectrum. Because it uses a smaller wavelength, it can provide sub-millimeter distance accuracy, and it is also able to penetrate certain materials such as plastics, wallboard and clothing, and is not affected by environmental conditions such as rain, fog, dust and snow. TI has two mmWave sensor families, AWR mmWave sensors for automotive and IWR mmWave sensors for industrial, drone and medical applications.

Millimeter wave sensors send signals using wavelengths in the millimeter (mm) range. This is considered a short wavelength in the electromagnetic spectrum, which is one of the advantages of the technology. The size of system components (such as antennas) required to process millimeter wave signals is really small. Another advantage of short wavelengths is high resolution. At frequencies of 76-81GHz, millimeter wave systems that resolve distances into wavelengths can achieve millimeter-level accuracy.

Furthermore, operating in this spectrum range gives mmWave sensors some interesting properties for the following reasons:

Material-penetrating: penetrates plastics, wallboard and clothing
Highly directional: forms a tight beam with 1° accuracy
Light-like: can be focused and steered using standard optical techniques
Large absolute bandwidth: can distinguish between two close objects

The transmitted signal can use different types of waveforms, including pulse, frequency shift keying (FSK), continuous wave (CW), and frequency modulated continuous waveform (FMCW). TI mmWave sensors implement fast FMCW, which allows reliable operation, fast sensing, and reduced ambiguity in dense scenes. Fast FMCW also provides accurate measurements of the distance and speed of objects, allowing TI mmWave sensors to provide multi-dimensional sensing.

A complete mmWave radar system includes transmit (TX) and receive (RX) radio frequency (RF) components, as well as analog components such as clocks and digital components such as analog-to-digital converters (ADCs), microcontroller units (MCUs), and digital signal processors (DSPs).

• "Millimeter Wave Basics" (white paper) (PDF, 1.0MB)

reflectometry

Good stuff, not bad!

alan000345

It's really good, you can check it out when you have time.