In recent years, the fast economic growth around the world resulted in the rapid development of the automobile industry. In addition to the level of comfortability, demand for safety in the cars has also increased. A driver assistance system is an appropriate answer to these challenges that can help the drivers to deal with complex traffic scenarios and improve the user-driving experience. In it, the radar sensor is the most important component to monitor the surrounding environment of the cars. The Universal Medium Range Radar (UMRR) is one such example, which operates in the 24 GHz band, and is generally utilized for advanced automotive driver assistance applications such as high precision parking aid, blind spot detection and high sensitivity pre-crash detection. In addition, UMRR can be employed as a support for cut-in, stop and go situations in the high range Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) systems. A suitable low cost solution for such automotive radars is the System-on-Package (SoP) platform that can remove the barrier against a speedy introduction of such systems into the lower class, high-volume car market.
Prof. Atif Shamim in collaboration with Prof. Khaled Salama led a team of KAUST founding master’s students, Farhan Abdul Ghaffar and Muhammad Umair Khalid to develop an aperture coupled fractal antenna array with integrated Fresnel Lens using a novel mixed LTCC tape. The lens has been realized in a high dielectric medium that makes it highly compact in size, while providing considerable gain enhancement. The antenna front end exhibits a size reduction of more than 80% as compared to the conventional designs reported for this band. Moreover, it demonstrates a bandwidth of 8% with an overall gain of 15 dB which is quite suitable for typical radar communication range. The low-cost, high performance, compactness and robustness of the design makes it highly suitable for automotive radar applications. The work was granted a US patent number: 8860607 on October 14th, 2014.
The work is described in detail in the following publication, F. A. Ghaffar, M. U. Khalid, K. N. Salama and A. Shamim, “24 GHz LTCC Fractal Antenna Array SoP with Integrated Fresnel Lens”, IEEE Antennas and Wireless Propagation Letter, vol. 10, no. 10, pp. 705- 708, July 2011.
Shamim, A. and Ghaffar, F.A. and Khalid, M.U. and Salama, K.N., "Gain enhanced LTCC system-on-package for UMRR applications", US Patent 8860607, 2014.
