When Will Automotive Radars Go Digital?
The increased processing power in transceivers has become an engine to improve imaging radars. A Boston startup, however, proposes to overhaul the underlying technology in transmitters/tranceivers.
(Source: iStock)
Most automotive OEMs not named Tesla see radars as crucial in making highly automated vehicles drive safely regardless of weather. Radars see through rain, snow, and fog, all of which frustrate cameras and human drivers alike.
Carmakers today keep wanting more – a whole lot more — from radars.
The demands on their long wish list include radars that produce much higher image resolution, radars better at separating objects and radars that detect objects reliably even in the dark. They also want radars that generate much denser point clouds, comparable to lidars, so they can spare the cost of buying lidars.
With more vehicles radar-equipped, carmakers worry legitimately about signal interference. Radars are also notorious for false positives. Both OEMs and consumers have little tolerance for technology that sees stuff on the road that’s not there.
NXP’s 3rd generation imaging radar
Earlier this month, NXP Semiconductors announced its third-generation imaging radar solutions, “based on a lot of lessons we’ve learned over the years,” said Matthias Feulner, head of ADAS marketing at NXP.
The Dutch semiconductor company claims that its new solution “delivers up to 2x processing performance in the radar MPU in a 38% smaller IC footprint.” It includes AI/ML support for features like enhanced Direction of Arrival (DoA) processing and object classification. NXP promises that the new radar chipset family achieves “comparable or better performance with up to 89 percent less antenna channels than alternative solutions.”
(Source: NXP)
NXP emphasized processing power, which it sees as critical to better image resolution. As a supplier of commercial radar chipsets in volume, NXP takes pride in offering automakers scalable radar solutions for various use cases, reducing system cost, size and power consumption.
Big three
Egil Juliussen, a veteran automotive industry analyst, cites a host of startups pursuing the automotive radar market. At CES 2025, he counted 29 companies with radar solutions, 31 percent of which were new.
But it might take a little more time for the radar technology revolution to unfold.
The current automotive radar market is pretty much locked up by a big three — NXP, Infineon and Texas Instruments. It’s hard to break into, observed Juliussen, “given that the big three supply radar chipsets already available in volume, and they own well-established relationships with OEMs.”
Complicating this situation is automakers’ desire to find better performing imaging radars. “Conventional radar guys must defend their turf against lidars,” Juliussen added.
Go digital
Meet Jungah Lee, CEO of Aura Intelligent Systems, Inc., a startup based in Boston. She has been pursuing and promoting the development of digital radar.
Initially, I wondered: Aren’t most automotive radars already digital?
Not so fast.
Radar chipsets consist of transmitters and transceivers. Most recent improvements in radar performance come from advancements of digital transceivers. In contrast, transmitters remain analog.
As Lee explained, “In conventional Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW) radars, radar chirp generation and compression are done in the analog domain.”
The problem, as she sees it, lies in how to best maintain coherence among multiple RF channels. “While it is critically important, at high frequencies that automotive radars are operating (76GHz to 81GHz), it’s extremely challenging to maintain coherence at this frequency,” she noted.
So, if automakers really want substantial improvement in radar performance, they must consider not just signal processing on transceivers but also the underlying technology [used for transmitters], which is based on an antiquated wave form that was used in the 1950’s, Lee explained.
Lee amassed her mobile communication technology expertise while working at Lucent Technologies and Samsung. She describes Aura’s advanced digital imaging radars as a system built by “combing high-resolution sensing and 5G-based communications into a unified platform.”
The key to Aura’s idea is moving the complexity of modulation to baseband. “Instead of cascading chips and synchronizing at 80GHz, the signal is coherently combined in baseband (i.e. 1-2GHz), making it orders of magnitude easier and more reliable in real operational environments,” said Lee. Creating high resolution images with radar gets easier, she added. Keeping the front-end “very dumb” became a familiar method in the communication world, Lee explained, when Qualcomm developed CDMA, the first digital modulation scheme for telecommunications.
Lee sees a potential advantage for Aura’s digital radars, given a huge progress that has been made in mobile communications. Thanks to advancements in 5G, wideband data converters (ADC), advanced mmWave RFIC and antennas for digital modulation are already available.
Drawing a comparison to conventional FMCW radars, Lee sees that digital modulation offers advantages in mitigating “ghosting,” minimizing “false alarms,” and handling “clutter” generated by multipath reflection. More specifically, she explained, “Instead of sending tones in FMCW or sub-carriers in conventional OFDM, we send specially encrypted signals that give us a 100x advantage in suppressing interference, without ghosting or clutter problems.”
Various modulation schemes
Not every digital radar uses the same modulation. Aura uses Chirp-Spread OFDM.
Uhnder, a developer of the industry’s first digital radar chips, uses Phase Modulation/Digital Code Modulation (DCM).
Uhnder, founded in 2015, made waves with their commercial digital radars that got designed into the Fisker Ocean electric SUV in November 2023. However, since Fisker’s 2024 bankruptcy, news from Uhnder has gone under the radar.
For Aura’s Lee, Europe’s Verano project spoke volumes about the automotive industry’s hunger for digital radar.
Verano Project
The Verano project unifies 11 partners led by Infineon Technologies. It includes a leading OEM (Mercedez Benz), a tier one (Robert Bosch), chip companies (Infineon and Missing Link Electronics). Other partners are KPIT and Fraunhofer IPMS. From academia, the Verano project has recruited Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Ulm University, Ruhr-University Bochum, Technical University Braunschweig, and Kassel University.
Begun in 2022, Verano will run until the end of 2025, according to project head Beate Grander, from Infineon. Its focus is on digital radar technology such as Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM).
Grander explained, “We are researching how relevant data can be processed quickly, safely and energy-efficiently in radar sensor networks for autonomous driving.”
More significantly, “in order to enhance the performance of multiple sensors within a vehicle, it is essential that they are synchronized to achieve a certain degree of coherence.” In the Verano project, “the synchronization is being prototyped using a field-programmable gate array (FPGA),” Grander noted.
The project anticipates partners along the OEM value chain to “benefit from the results, ranging from high-frequency components, antennas, microcontrollers with integrated AI functionality to fully integrated, intelligent radar sensor systems to meet the high requirements of fully autonomous driving,” explained Grander.
Asked for the current status of the Verano project, she noted, “So far, the team has developed various demonstrators and tested them in the laboratory. In the consortium, for example, we are working on further improving image quality, energy efficiency, reliability and real-time capability. We are also integrating other sensors such as lidar in order to obtain a 3D image of the surroundings and detect hazards in advance.”
She added, “The sensor system has also been integrated into a demonstration vehicle from Mercedes Benz. Here, the system is primarily intended to prove its practical suitability for the high-quality requirements in the automotive industry.”
The challenge is in cost
Before Verano’s new OFDM digital radars see the light of day on the commercial market, the big challenge is cost. “Given that radar is a universal feature of all types of cars worldwide … cost is a key consideration. OFDM has higher requirements (10-20x higher speed) on the data converters (DAC/ADC) and the transmitter circuitry. The system must be able to compete with existing FMCW radar modules, which have been optimized for decades,” noted Grander.
Asked about digital radars, NXP’s Feulner said, “They are often conceptually fascinating, and they serve well for proof of concept” without yet achieving “a high-volume projection for building reliable sensors that must last a long time.”
NXP isn’t part of the Verano project. Asked why, Feulner cited cooperation with many of its partners and added, “We are not participating as part of the consortium, but we are supporting some of the participants with our radar hardware.”
Aura, with its own digital radar platform called QuadRay, is still two years away from launching a digital imaging radar ASIC.
(Source: Aura)
The entirely programmable QuadRay platform is important to Aura, because the startup must work on adoption of digital radars among many stakeholders. Lee explained, “We are pretty active in the automotive industry, as we discuss with them about the different architectures and what we see the right technology is, and where we split, and how we integrate this into more centralized architecture.”
Beyond the automotive industry, Lee said, “We also see large demand from advanced R&D organizations looking for 6G Integrated Sensing and Communications (ISAC) capabilities in various industrial vehicles and autonomous robots. They have been searching the world looking for a platform which validates our thesis.”
As noted, Aura’s invention is in moving intelligence to baseband in the digital domain, instead of installing complexity in the RF. In principle, by manipulating code in the digital domain and sending it through OFDM—which is ubiquitous today—Lee said, “We solved the problems of the conventional FMCW radars.”
Phase one is about getting the market to think about digital radars. But phase two, scaling its business, Aura must develop an ASIC. Lee said, “We want to partner up for the RF IC, instead of us trying to build everything.”
Aura at this point is still very small, with eight people. It has raised $5 million, with early funding from an Activate Entrepreneurial fellowship, DARPA, and MIT Lincoln Lab, and got subsequent equity investments to develop its 'QuadRay' imaging radar platform.
Automotive is still Aura’s primary market. But Lee added, “There is tremendous momentum in the robotics and defense sector, looking for a high precision spatial sensing solution.” She said her company is raising a seed round of $10 million “to commercialize 'QuadRay' imaging radar to address this void.”