A Two Sweeping VCO Source for Heterodyne FMCW Radar

Abstract

We propose and develop a heterodyne frequency modulated continuous wave (FMCW) radar system. The system operates at 14 GHz with a 500-MHz bandwidth in a 100-mu s sweeping period, based on two wideband linear RF voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO) sweeping sources, which are controlled by a direct digital synthesizer (DDS) through a phase-locked scheme, leading to a high linearity of the frequency chirping signal. To achieve low phase noise, the RF signals are synthesized from low-noise baseband signals which are generated through a generation scheme of using phase-locked oscillators operating in the 800-MHz frequency range. Additionally, the proposed architecture can eliminate the phase noise contributions and/or frequency deviation due to the uncorrelation of different VCOs. The results are verified through measurements and derivation.