Experimental Evaluation of Various LFM Waveforms for FMCW Radar Applications

Various waveforms like linear sawtooth frequency modulated waveform, segmented linear sawtooth frequency modulated waveform, linear triangular frequency modulated waveform, and segmented linear triangular frequency modulated waveform are generated and tested. A hardware evaluation module is constructed as a prototype with a TSW14J56EVM capture card, AFE7950EVM transceiver, horn antennas, low noise amplifiers, and Texas Instruments high-speed data converter (HSDC) pro software. The inphase (I) and quadrature-phase (Q) components of the waveform are excited at the transmitter end and received at the receiver end. Rigorous experimentation is carried out by varying the number of chips per frame (16 and 32), the center frequency (850MHz and 2450MHz), and bandwidth (100MHz and 200MHz) to evaluate the performance of the waveform. It is observed that the up-chirp LFM is superior to all other configurations by providing the received power of −52.77dB by configuring the setup with 2450MHz center frequency, 100MHz bandwidth, and 32 chirps per frame.