Impulse radar on a chip for medical, security, automotive and other applications

Novelda is a startup in Norway that has Impulse Radar on a 5 millimeter by 5 mm chip. The device can sense the distance to one or more remote objects by emitting and receiving very short pulses of electromagnetic energy.

The pulses used by the Novelda Impulse Radars are typically shorter than 1 nanosecond in duration, and their bandwidth spans over several GHz in the frequency domain. Different materials have different penetration properties, and the optimal bandwidth for a given application will depend on the material that needs to be penetrated. Novelda offers several different bandwidths, all between 1 and 10 GHz.

The Nanoscale Impulse Radar from Novelda is a full radar transceiver integrated on a single piece of silicon. When connected the suitable antennas, the chip is capable of simultaneously transmitting ultra short electromagnetic pulses, sample the reflected signal and store it as a sequence of discrete samples. The architecture of the receiver is based on a clever averaging scheme, enabling it to recover signals buried beneath the noise floor. By parallelizing the sampling structure, the receiver is able to capture up to 512 points in one go. The resulting output is a digital reconstruction of the analog signal present at the input of the receiver, sampled at over 30 GS/s.

Application Ideas

Medical Diagnosis

Breathing
Heartbeat
3D RF-imaging

Health Monitoring

Sleep Monitor
Stress Monitor
Pulse Monitor

Security Surveillance

Motion detector
Invisible Fence
Obstacle penetrating vision

Automotive and Industrial

Distance detector
Road obstacle detector
Liquid level gauge

Miscellaneous

Stud detector
Item-loss alert
Embossed bar-code reader

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