Autonomously operating systems, missiles and vehicles will significantly shape the industrial production, logistics and mobility of the future. In order to ensure maximum safety, such autonomous systems must be able to orient themselves in their environment at all times by means of spatial sensors.
In the project, the gap in terms of range resolution and interference immunity to environmental conditions is to be closed by combining high-precision radar and miniaturized beam scanning technology. In order to achieve a resolution corresponding to optical systems, the classical mm-wave frequencies used by current commercial radar systems will be abandoned and entered the tera-hertz range (>0.1 THz). This step provides more bandwidth, which is essential for the higher resolution. First radar transceiver modules for these ranges (122 GHz; 220 GHz) are currently reaching the market. These high resolution radar sensors can be extended to space sensing by a fast scanning motion. This mechanical motion is achieved via a MEMS antenna architecture, which is similarly found in LIDAR application (where it would be a MEMS mirror). These MEMS actuated antennas are realized via a novel silicon LTCC composite substrate (SiCer), which combines mechanical actuators on silicon and microwave functionalities in LTCC in a special way. The aim of the MEMS-Radar project is to combine the individual technology modules established at the partners (pivoting MEMS structures - TUI/UB, radar signal processing - FHR, design and construction of ultra-high frequency systems - TUB) for low-cost, miniaturized and spatial-resolution (and thus also imaging) radar sensors for relevant market segments (autonomous driving, civil security application), to validate them jointly and to implement them in a demonstrator.
