EEC 193 Senior Design Project Proposal

Project title: ___An FMCW RADAR for Range, Doppler, and SAR Measurements ____ Supervising ECE faculty member(s): _Xiaoguang Liu, Rick Branner, Neville Luhmann, Anh-Vu Pham_______________ Outside collaborating department/company/agency: ______________________________ Maximum number of independent project teams: Fall-Winter _5__ Winter-Spring _0__ Target size for each project team (at least 3, typically less than 6 students): _4-5___ Disciplines covered by project (at least 3)1: electromagnetics, analog circuit design, signal processing Course prerequisites2: EEC110A&B, EEC130A&B, EEC132AB (can be taken concurrently) EEC150A Detailed project description: Introduction This course provides the students an opportunity to work on a hands-on project related to RF/microwave systems by implementing a Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW) radar system that can perform range, Doppler, and Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) measurements. The project integrates RF/microwave engineering, analog circuit design, and digital signal processing. The participating teams are expected to build working FMCW radar systems and devise measurement plans to demonstrate the capabilities of the systems. The project can be used as a demo of our undergraduate engineering education in industry outreach events. The outcome of the project can potentially be used to attract industry
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Disciplines may be within or outside ECE. Examples disciplines within ECE include: analog circuit design, VLSI design, electromagnetics, optics, electronic materials, signal processing, communication, control, power, motors, computer aided design, computer architecture, computer networking, digital system design, algorithms and software engineering.
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Each team should cover all prerequisites, but because of the multidisciplinary nature of projects, each student may not cover all prerequisites. Thus prerequisites may often be joined by OR rather than AND.

sponsors and collaborators. Some potential companies that may be interested in this project include Agilent, Raytheon, Northrop-Grumman, etc. Approach The basic design of the project is based on an MIT OCW short course Build a Small Radar System Capable of Sensing Range, Doppler, and Synthetic Aperture Radar Imaging (http://ocw.mit.edu/resources/res-ll-003-build-a-small-radar-system-capable-of-sensingrange-doppler-and-synthetic-aperture-radar-imaging-january-iap-2011/). This project will build upon the above course and expand it into a two-quarter effort. The block diagram of the FMCW radar is shown in Fig. 1.

Figure 1 Block diagram of the FMCW radar.

In the first offering of this project, we will start by building a FMCW system using off-theshelf components and making sure that the system functions properly. The student team can then be divided into two sub-teams. One sub-team will focus on the measurement and digital signal processing part. The other sub-team will work on RF components design with the aim of building the entire system in-house (transistors will be still be purchased or supplied by sponsors). Another option for the second half of the project is to re-design the system at a higher frequency band (e.g. 5-5.8 GHz) using commercial RF components. This radar system can be used to for range measurement, speed (Doppler) measurement and SAR imaging. Some example measurement results are shown in Fig. 2

(a) (b) (c) Figure 2 Example measurements using the FMCW radar. (a) Range measurement; (b) Doppler measurement; (c) SAR imaging. Courtesy of the MIT OCW course.

By the end of the project, a report will be submitted by the team detailing the construction of the system, the measurement plan, measurement results and analysis/discussion. Each team is also required to do a final presentation of their work with hardware demonstration. Evaluation Students are graded on successfully completing project milestones, final report, final presentation, and system demonstration. A tentative breakdown of the grades is as follows: Working system using commercial RF components Measurement results Option 1: In-house components design and fabrication Working system using all in-house RF components Option 2: Working system at higher frequency band Final presentation & demonstration Cost Estimate: Quarter 1: Working system using commercial RF components. Quarter 2: In-house components design and fabrication ~$400 ~$600 30% 20% 30% (option 1) 20% (extra credit) 30% (option 2) 20%

Total ~$1000 Prospects The first offering of this project aims to demonstrate a baseline FMCW radar system for a senior design project in the RF/microwave area. Future offering can improve this baseline system in several aspects. Examples include: (a) A more sophisticated radar system, such as a phased-array radar (b) Design competition with volume/weight/cost specification (c) Applications of radar systems to other disciplines