A Low-Resolution ADC Proof-of-Concept Development for a Fully-Digital Millimeter-wave Joint Communication-Radar

A fully-digital mmWave wideband JCR places difficult demands of power consumption and hardware complexity on the receivers’ analog-to-digital converters (ADCs). To address these concerns, we present a low-complexity proof-of-concept (PoC) development for a wideband MIMO JCR that uses a mmWave communications waveform and low-resolution ADCs, while maintaining a separate radio-frequency chain per antenna. To accurately characterize the radar performance of our developed PoC tested, we conduct experiments using a trihedral corner reflector and apply traditional as well as advanced receiver processing algorithms. The results demonstrate that our MIMO PoC platform with a fully-digital JCR waveform at 73 GHz carrier frequency, 2 GHz bandwidth, and 1-bit ADCs achieves high range/direction estimation accuracy as well as high detection capability with a wide field of view.