Software Configurable Multi-mode Radar Sensor System for Range Tracking and Life Sensing

In this paper, a software-configurable multi-mode radar is demonstrated with four detection modes that can be adaptively chosen with a microcontroller-based signal synthesizer. These include Doppler, frequency shift keying (FSK), frequency modulated continuous wave (FMCW), and stepped frequency continuous wave (SFCW). For the FMCW and SFCW mode, a nonlinearity compensation technique is implemented in the software, whose advantages are experimentally demonstrated. Range tracking in the FSK mode and life monitoring in the Doppler mode are also realized. The software-configurable multi-mode sensor has a potential impact on IoT applications by adaptively trade among spectrum usage, computational load, sensitivity, resolution, and accuracy.