Phase Noise Power Spectral Density Estimation In Cascaded Automotive Radar Transceiver Mmics

The rising demand for high resolution radars in automotive applications requires cascading of several monolithic microwave integrated circuits (MMICs) in order to provide a larger number of transmit and receive channels As for single MMIC radar solutions, also in cascaded radar systems phase noise (PN) is one of the most dominant signal distortions limiting detection sensitivity and range. In this work we present a novel method to estimate the mean PN power spectral density of two radar MMICs during operation. This estimation result can subsequently be used to detect if the MMICs generate PN out of specification. Different to most of the existing work, our method uses an application relevant frequency modulated continuous wave signal instead of a continuous wave signal.