Student Design Competition

IMS 2021 Student Design Competition Winning Projects

1st place: FAU, Germany (Marie Horlbeck, Sebastian Peters, Florian Probst)

Contact person: Marie Horlbeck (marie.horlbeck@fau.de) 

In this work, we demonstrate a high sensitivity, fast-response, low-power portable 24 GHz monostatic radar as a solution tailored to the design competition “High-Sensitivity Motion Sensing Radar”. Since today’s radio frequency chips are more efficient and smaller in size than related chips in recent years, the BGT24LTR11N16 – a silicon germanium radar MMIC for signal generation and reception, operating in the 24GHz to 24.25GHz ISM band – is used for transceiving. To improve the signal strength, a patch antenna with appropriate directional characteristics and an antenna gain of 20 dBi was developed. Since amplitudes of only 10 μm have to be measured, a high SNR is required. This is achieved through adequate baseband signal conditioning and a high-resolution 24-Bit ADC. Since the signal processing takes place directly on the microcontroller, no external devices need to be connected. The results are transferred to a subsequent display. 

2nd place: TTU, US (Davi Rodrigues, Changzhi Li)

Contact person: Davi Rodrigues (Davi.Rodrigues@ttu.edu) 

A 125-GHz Doppler radar was proposed for the high-sensitivity motion sensing radar competition. An embedded microcontroller was used to sample the I/Q baseband signals, and the data was transmitted to a computer through an UART/USB converter. A graphical user interface in MATLAB was programmed to help us providing tiny amplitude displacements and the corresponding motion frequencies in a timely manner.