Industry Expert Blogs

The big controversy about sensors in autonomous driving is whether lidar is essential. Radar has improved significantly in resolution and so I like to phrase the question as to whether radar is getting better faster than lidar is getting cheaper. Today's focus is on radar since the technology is playing an increasingly important role, driven by automotive ADAS applications. These applications require higher performance and more capabilities from the radar module to determine distance, direction, and speed of targets in a multi-target scenario.

The radar technology used is known as frequency modulated continuous wave (FMCW), typically in the 77GHz band. Instead of putting out individual radar pulses and measuring the time-of-flight for the echo to return, the radar is transmitted continuously but with frequency varying, typically in a linear sawtooth wave.