Infineon creates radar sensors to monitor people in self-driving cars

When self-driving cars hit the market, they will need to monitor the well being of the “driver” and passengers in the car. Infineon Technologies is announcing some sensors today that can do this just that using radar technology.

The radar can detect subtle movements of the people in a car, detecting children who may have been inadvertently left behind. Or drivers who are having a heart attack or some other emergency. Or passengers who have simply fallen asleep in the car.

With this data, the intelligent car can make send out emergency alerts or make adjust ments, such as making sure that seat belts and emergency air bags are in the right positions.

In-cabin monitoring systems

Car makers refer to this as in-cabin monitoring systems (ICMS), and Infineon believes a 60GHz radar sensor is particularly promising as a sensor for these applications. The company is unveiling its Xensiv 60GHz radar sensors and Aurix microcontrollers to control them today for ultra-short-range automotive applications.

These are new additions to a wide variety of products that Infineon offers for an ultra-wideband, ultra-low power and cost-performance scalable architecture for ICMS subsystems. The devices support the use of new signal processing techniques enabling robustness and a good
compromise between computational costs, the degree of information as well as the power consumption of the system.

The Xensiv BGT60ATR24C radar sensor is a cognitive sensing solution with multiple transmit/receive for virtual array configurations, a highly agile modulation generation mechanism, automatic power mode configurability as well as simplified interfaces between RF and the processing side. Furthermore, the Aurix TC3xx microcontroller family combines performance with a powerful safety architecture. The family integrates a fast radar signal processing unit and enhanced security with the second-generation of the hardware security module (HSM). This includes asymmetric cryptography accelerators.

Partners

Infineon has partnerships with Bitsensing, a South Korean imaging radar technology start-up; and Caaresys, a start-up based in Israel. The partners can enable customers to accelerate their development cycle.