Radar system makes this a smart car

Car radar is not new. It has been sold for about a decade, mostly as an option on luxury cars - last year, about 2 percent of new cars sold in the United States had adaptive cruise control. But radar may be showing up on more cars soon, due to better, cheaper antennas, sensors, and signal processors made by Analog Devices Inc., the chip maker based in Norwood, as well as companies like Austin-based Freescale Semiconductor Inc. and Infineon Technologies AG, of Germany.

Today’s car radar is dramatically different from what was available a decade ago, said Mike Thoeny, director of engineering for electronic controls at Delphi Automotive LLP, which makes the adaptive cruise control system used in the Ford Focus. He said the systems were originally almost handcrafted, but now can be mass-manufactured. The industry has “miniaturized this old military-style radar, come up with new and creative wave forms and chipsets, new antennae concepts,’’ Thoeny said.

A number of chips are used in car radar systems, each specialized for different functions: generating the radar signal, transmitting the signal, serving as antennas to receive the echo made when the signal bounces off an object, and converting that echo into digital form so it can be processed into data the car can understand.

What the chips don’t do is make 360-degree sweeps of the horizon, because they are mounted to specific areas of the car to survey segments of the environment.

Coming next are systems that do more work with fewer components.

Thoeny said that today’s adaptive cruise control systems use three radar antennas in the front of the car. Freescale will release a chip next year that combines radar radio frequency functions with some digital ones. Such integration “helps [lower] costs,’’ said Dan Viza, director of business initiatives in Freescale’s sensor and actuator unit.