Texas Instruments IWR1843/IWR1843A Industrial mmWave Radar Sensor

Texas Instruments IWR1843/IWR1843A Industrial mmWave Radar Sensor is an integrated single-chip millimeter-wave sensor based on FMCW radar technology. The IWR1843 is capable of operating in the 76GHz to 81GHz band with up to 4GHz continuous chirp. The IWR1843/IWR1843A sensors feature the low-power 45nm RFCMOS process enabling unprecedented levels of integration in an extremely small form factor. The IWR1843/IWR1843A Sensors are an ideal solution for low-power, self-monitored, ultra-accurate radar systems in industrial applications, such as building automation, factory automation, drones, material handling, traffic monitoring, and surveillance.

The IWR1843/IWR1843A includes a monolithic implementation of a 3TX, 4RX system with built-in PLL and ADC converters. The IWR1843/IWR1843A also integrates a DSP subsystem containing a TI high-performance C674x DSP for radar signal processing. The device includes an Arm® R4F-based processor subsystem responsible for front-end configuration, control, and calibration. Simple programming model changes facilitate a wide variety of sensor implementation with the possibility of dynamic reconfiguration for implementing a multimode sensor. The Hardware Accelerator block (HWA) can perform radar processing and can help save MIPS on the DSP for higher-level algorithms.

The IWR1843/IWR1843A Industrial Radar Sensor is provided as a complete platform solution including TI reference designs, software drivers, sample configurations, API guides, training, and user documentation.

Features

FMCW transceiver
- Integrated PLL, transmitter, receiver, Baseband, and ADC
- 76GHz to 81GHz coverage with 4GHz available bandwidth
- Four receive channels
- Three transmit channels
- Ultra-accurate chirp engine based on fractional-N PLL
- TX power: 12dBm
Built-in calibration and self-test (monitoring)
- Arm^® Cortex^®-R4F-based radio control system
- Built-in firmware (ROM)
- Self-calibrating system across frequency and temperature
C674x DSP for FMCW signal processing
On-chip memory: 2MB
Cortex-R4F microcontroller for object tracking and classification, and interface control
- Supports autonomous mode (loading user application from QSPI Flash memory)
Integrated peripherals
- Internal memories With ECC
Host interface
- CAN and CAN-FD
Power management
- Built-in LDO network for enhanced PSRR
- I/Os support dual voltage 3.3V/1.8V
Other interfaces available to user application
- Up to six ADC channels
- Up to two SPI channels
- Up to two UARTs
- I²C
- GPIOs
- 2-lane LVDS interface for raw ADC data and debug instrumentation

IWR1843 advanced features
- Embedded self-monitoring with no host processor involvement
- Complex baseband architecture
- Embedded interference detection capability
- Programmable phase rotators in transmit path to enable beamforming
Functional Safety-Compliant
- Developed for functional safety applications
- Documentation available to aid IEC 61508 functional safety system design up to SIL 3
- Hardware integrity up to SIL-2
- Safety-related certification
- IEC 61508 certified up to SIL 2 by TUV SUD
Clock source
- Supports external oscillator at 40MHz
- Supports externally driven clock (square/sine) at 40MHz
- Supports 40MHz crystal connection with load capacitors
Easy hardware design
- 0.65mm pitch, 161-pin 10.4mm × 10.4mm flip-chip BGA package for easy assembly and low-cost PCB design
- Small solution size