Building on their long-standing relationship, Freescale Semiconductor and Continental announced plans to integrate Freescale’s next 77 GHz radar technology into Continental’s next generation short- and mid-range automotive radar modules. This effort represents the next step in the evolution of Continental’s comprehensive advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) radar solutions, helping automakers meet safety mandates and extend ADAS safety benefits to more vehicles.
Defined and developed from the ground up to address the ISO 26262 standard, Freescale’s next radar chipset integrates a complete radar system, providing coverage around the vehicle for applications such as emergency braking, blind spot detection, lane keeping assistance and pedestrian detection. The system delivers scalability for processing power, channel count, field of view and most importantly, safety – enabling multiple radar modules to provide coverage for surround sensing around the vehicle. A significant reduction in the number of chips enables a smaller form factor and less obtrusive integration into the vehicle, while maintaining lower power consumption and high radio frequency (RF) performance.
These advanced capabilities will build on Continental’s exceptional current generation ARS 400 Long Range Radar Sensor. Shipping today, Continental’s ARS 400 radar solution incorporates Freescale’s MR2001 77 GHz multichannel radar transceiver and MPC577xK microcontroller with integrated radar signal ADC’s and a dedicated radar DSP. The highly integrated ARS 400 encompasses the entire signal path from 77 GHz antenna input to the car’s network connection, enabling a reliable, feature rich, small form factor radar solution.
“The ADAS market is growing rapidly and there is demand for a next-generation radar platform with integrated functional safety compliant with the ISO 26262 standard,” said Dr. Thomas Brohm, Vice President Engineering, Business Unit Advanced Driver Assistance Systems at Continental. “Our continued work with Freescale will enable automotive OEMs to meet increasingly stringent safety protocols, such as those under the European New Car Assessment Program (NCAP).”
As the industry leader in silicon for automotive radar applications, Freescale has developed and shipped more than one million radar integrated circuits into the market. The company’s next generation of 77 GHz radar solutions builds on its existing S32R radar microcontroller and MR2001 scalable radar transceiver chipset, which are already shipping today.
“To advance the truly ‘assisted’ driver, the role of radar and other technologies is expanding to provide coverage around the entire vehicle,” said Jürgen Weyer, Vice President, Automotive Sales & Marketing – EMEA at Freescale. “We are very pleased to continue our strong relationship with Continental to make our roads safer by facilitating broader adoption of radar in more mainstream vehicles.”
As a key to enabling highly automated driving, radar data is complementary to automotive vision systems, such as Freescale’s S32V vision microprocessor announced earlier this year. Samples of the next-generation 77 GHz radar solution are expected later this year.