Automotive safety is evolving from passive systems such as seat belts, airbags and crash detection to active sensing networks capable of collision avoidance and accident prevention. Radar is an especially promising active safety improvement and has the potential to significantly reduce the number and severity of distracted driving accidents. Analog Devices Inc., whose integrated inertial sensing iMEMS® technology helped make airbags a standard automotive safety feature more than 15 years ago, is introducing an affordable, high-performance, radar AFE (analog front-end) IC. Watch this video to learn more about automotive radar and the AD8283 Radar AFE:
ADI’s highly integrated AD8283 automotive radar AFE IC includes the receive path signal conditioning and data capture circuitry to enable end systems for adaptive cruise control, blind spot detection and other radar-based detection and avoidance applications.
“Thanks to national vehicle safety legislation, such as the introduction of legislation requiring mandatory installation of ADAS (Advanced Driver Assistance Systems), fewer drivers died on US roads last year than at any time since 1949,” said Thomas Wessel, Vice President, automotive group, Analog Devices. “This is largely due to the fact that automotive safety has entered the era of the intelligent vehicle, and affordable in-car radar systems with excellent target classification and range resolution are a key feature of that. As in-car radar moves from a luxury option to a standard safety feature, the AD8283 automotive radar AFE will allow designers to program the settings they need for different operating conditions and meet the automotive industry’s exacting quality and cost requirements.”
The six-channel AD8283 is AEC-Q100 qualified and operates over the -40° to +105°C automotive temperature range. The new device allows a radar system to receive a higher number of transmitted signals and decode them for target identification and classification. This translates to more time on target, which improves the radar’s ability to resolve the approximate size of the target.
The AD8283 integrates a 12-bit, 80 MSPS (million samples per second) A/D converter with 67-dB SNR (signal-to-noise ratio) and 68 dB SFDR (spurious-free dynamic range). It features on-chip signal conditioning, including a programmable-gain amplifier, low-noise amplifier, and a programmable, third-order, low-pass elliptic filter. The AD8283 is gain-programmable via an SPI port in 6 dB steps from 16 dB to 34 dB and has <3.5 nV/rtHz input-referred voltage noise at maximum gain. The new AFE has 200 Ω or 200 kΩ selectable input impedance and consumes only 170 mW per channel.
