D3 Engineering has launched the DesignCore RS-1843A mmWave Radar Sensor Evaluation Kit, a small form factor single-board solution that allows implementation of many different mmWave radar sensing algorithms for production-intended devices. The kit is ideal for developers of drones and robotic systems used for measuring, detecting, and tracking applications.
The DesignCore Evaluation Kit is based around the Texas Instruments (TI) AWR1843, a single-chip 76-GHz to 81-GHz automotive radar sensor that integrates a DSP, an MCU and a radar accelerator and features an RF front end with a PLL, three transmitters, four receivers, and a baseband ADC. With bandwidths up to 4 GHz, the system provides 12 dBm transmit power and a noise figure of 15 dB or better across the band. The processing cores in the AWR1843 include a C674x DSP for FMCW signal processing, a hardware accelerator for radar cube processing, and a Cortex-R4F microcontroller for object tracking, classification, and communications.
The kit includes an easy-to-use USB-Serial interface that can be used with a PC or embedded platform to facilitate field testing, sensor evaluation, algorithm development, and application demonstrations. A high-density connector allows mating with optional baseboards providing additional interfaces and functionality, including access to the raw baseband ADC data samples. This interface also provides CAN-FD, I2C, SPI, GPIO and UART connections. The main interface is a USB-C connector which can act as a power supply input as well as enumerating two serial UARTS, one for console and the other for processed radar returns or other algorithm output.
The DesignCore Evaluation Kit includes custom firmware ensuring board support for the latest version of the SDK from TI.
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