Revealed at CES today, AWRL6844 is a 60GHz radar made on a 40nm RF CMOS process and packaged in a 9.1 x 9.1mm BGA.
Running AI algorithms locally, it is intended to provide occupancy monitoring for seat belt reminder, child presence detection and intrusion detection through four transmit antennas and four receive antennas.
“AWRL6844 enables engineers to incorporate three in-cabin sensing features to replace sensor technologies such as in-seat weight mats and ultrasonic sensors,” according to TI. “While driving, it supports occupant detection and localisation with 98% accuracy to enable seat belt reminders. After parking, it monitors for unattended children in the vehicle, using neural networks that detect micro-movements in real time with over 90% classification accuracy. This direct sensing capability enables OEMs to meet 2025 Euro NCAP [European New Car Assessment Program] design requirements.”
It is an FMCW radar with 7GHz of bandwidth across 57 to 64GHz. Typical specs are 13dBm transmit power to each external antenna, 12.5dB noise figure and -89dBc/Hz phase noise at 1MHz. IF bandwidth is 10MHz and the receive channels are real-only.
An Arm Cortex-M3 processor controls the front-end, while a 450MHz C66x DSP is included for numerically-intensive radar post-processing.
Also on the die is a 200MHz Cortex-R5F application processor, with a double precision floating point unit and a 200MHz hardware accelerator for FFT, log magnitude and CFAR(constant false alarm rate) processing.
The company has included built-in calibration and self-test hardware towards ASIL-B certification, and cyber security hardware towards ISO21434 certification.
