High Performance Waveform Generator Design for Full-Coherent Millimeter-Wave Radar

Millimeter-wave radar has attracted much attention as a replacement of some infrared or laser systems currently in use. In this paper, an approach of developing high performance waveform for full-coherent millimeter-wave radar is proposed. With good frequency configuration and optimal utilization of DDS (direct digital synthesizer), PLL (phase locked loop) and FPGA (field programming gate array), the developed radar waveform generator implemented with low complexity has the good performance of both spectrum purity (phase noise and spur level) and switching speed. The measurement results show that, in S/C band, the local oscillator´s bandwidth is 480MHz and the minimum frequency step is 15MHz, the spur level is better than -65dBc, the phase noise level is better than -94dBc/Hz@1kHz, the maximum frequency switching time is less than 15mus.