National Instruments has launched its new ADAS test solution designed for short- and long-range radar in the 76–81GHz range. It is based on the company’s mmWave front-end technology and the PXIe-5840 second-generation vector signal transceiver (VST).
“NI’s new ADAS test solution offers a unique approach to radar characterization and testing with its scalable capability to conduct both traceable RF measurements and system simulation,” said Stefano Concezzi, VP of the global automotive initiative at National Instruments.
“With regulatory requirements still evolving, the flexibility of this solution allows engineers to quickly adapt their test systems to address the challenges of new radar scenarios.”
The system combines NI’s second-generation VST with banded, frequency-specific upconverters and downconverters designed to test the 76-81GHz radar band with 1GHz of real-time bandwidth. Thanks to this design, the system can function as an mmWave vector signal generator and vector signal analyzer.
Engineers can program the VST’s FPGA (field programmable gate arrays) with LabView to use the ADAS test solution for radar target emulation, a technique in which test equipment emulates the radar cross section, range, radial velocity and angle of arrival of a particular object. This is essential for testing a radar system’s software and hardware.
Said Niels Koch, radar component owner at Audi, “With the PXI VST, the combination of wide bandwidth and low-latency software allowed us to discover an automotive radar sensor like never before – even allowing us to identify critical bugs in our radar module that we could not detect before.”
October 18, 2016