NXP and Zendar Inc. accelerate development of high-resolution radar

【Lansheng Technology News】November 8, 2023 -NXP Semiconductorsrecently announced its investment and cooperation in software startup Zendar Inc. Zendar is committed to transforming automotive autonomous driving systems through high-resolution radar. The investment is designed to accelerate and advance high-resolution radar solutions for autonomous driving and advanced driver assistance systems, further complementing NXP’s leading scalable radar portfolio.

NXP and Zendar will collaborate to develop enhanced high-resolution radar systems for automotive applications based on distributed aperture radar. DAR is a technology developed by Zendar to simplify system solutions. This investment consolidates NXP’s technology leadership position in the automotive radar market, strengthens the ecosystem, and represents another step towards improving road safety.

Both AD and ADAS applications require high-resolution sensing to ensure vehicles operate safely on the road. DAR provides a smart path to this, improving the resolution of high-performance radar systems while eliminating the need for thousands of antenna channels. DAR collaboratively fuses information from multiple radar sensors on the vehicle to form a larger-scale effective antenna, thereby achieving previously unachievable sensing resolution.

The technology enables high angular resolution of less than 0.5°, providing LiDAR-like performance, which is critical for accurately mapping the environment, whereas traditional radar sensors typically have resolutions between 2° and 4°. In addition, DAR's flexible mounting technology offers the potential to further increase resolution.

The radar solution will be based onNXP'swidely adopted S32R radar processor platform and RFCMOS SAF8x single-chip SoC. It is customized to cover the increasingly diverse automotive architectures of automotive OEMs and will help accelerate the transition to distributed architectures. Automakers and Tier 1 suppliers will benefit from a high-resolution system that significantly simplifies standard radar, has lower thermal complexity, takes up less space, and is flexible and easy to install.