Moving target range detection algorithm for FMCW radar

In the typical FMCW radar, the two-step FFT method is mainly used to extract the target velocity and range. While this approach is very useful to detect the simultaneous range and velocity, the computational effort is very high because all range bins are computed by FFT (Fast Fourier Transform) to extract the target velocity. Moreover, in some radar applications, the only moving target range is the range of interest, and the velocity information is not required. In this paper, we propose a type of low-complexity hardware architecture for FMCW radar that detects the moving target´s range. Because this method uses two simple detectors an all-target detector and a stationary-target detector instead of the two-step FFT, the computational complexity is reduced. By means of a simulation, we verify the proposed method in a comparison with a typical method.