National Instruments announced a technology demonstration of a new Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) Test Solution at European Microwave Week (EuMW) 2016. The ADAS Test Solution is designed for short- and long-range radar in the 76–81 GHz range, and is based on NI’s mmWave front end technology and the recently released PXIe-5840 second-generation vector signal transceiver (VST).

The ADAS Test Solution combines NI’s second-generation VST with banded, frequency-specific upconverters and downconverters designed to test the 76–81 GHz radar band with 1 GHz of real-time bandwidth. The system can function as an mmWave vector signal generator and vector signal analyzer because of this design.

Engineers can program the VST’s FPGA with LabVIEW to use the ADAS Test Solution for radar target emulation, a technique in which test equipment emulates the radar cross section, range, radial velocity and angle of arrival of a particular object. This is essential for testing a radar system’s software and hardware.

“Radar is the key technology of the future, and the importance of radar system reliability requires advanced approaches to testing,” said Niels Koch, radar component owner at Audi. “With the PXI VST, the combination of wide bandwidth and low-latency software allowed us to discover an automotive radar sensor like never before—even allowing us to identify critical bugs in our radar module that we could not detect before.”