With Auto Shanghai 2025 in full swing, the latest car models and technologies on display have made the show a competitive arena for automotive innovations. Some popular car models with ADAS, such as the BYD models with "God’s Eye C", AITO models, NIO ET9, Deepal S09, Zeekr 001, etc., have Calterah mmWave SoCs inside their radar systems. Such chips and solutions from Calterah are helping automotive OEMs achieve safer and more reliable ADAS functions.

An Advanced Driver Assistance System (ADAS) uses automotive sensors such as radar, cameras, LiDAR, electronic control units (ECUs), and algorithms to perceive the surrounding environment in real time, offering alerts or active interventions to enhance the safety and comfort of driving. As cars become more intelligent, mmWave radar is becoming a key sensor for ADAS systems. So far, major Chinese car OEMs have launched their ADAS solutions. Among them, the God’s Eye system of BYD and Dubhe Plan 2.0 system of Changan use 5R (5 radars), and the G-Pilot system of Geely and Falcon system of Chery deploy 3R−5R solutions, leading to a surge in demand for mmWave radar chips.

The unique advantage of mmWave radar lies in its ability to effectively compensate for the limitations of optical sensors. In complex scenarios, such as views getting blocked by vehicles, encountering glare in tunnels, driving at night, driving under rainy and foggy weather, etc., mmWave radar ensures the reliable operation of sensing systems in all weathers, with its stable detection via electromagnetic wave. This makes it an indispensable part of active safety systems. As driving-assistance systems evolve, multi-sensor fusion has become a trend, with mmWave radar playing an irreplaceable role in the fusion sensing architecture, owing to its ranging accuracy and interference resistance.

At the 2025 Automotive Semiconductor Ecosystem Summit of the show, Calterah's Marketing Director Wu Xiang highlighted, "As a global leader in CMOS mmWave radar chip development and design, Calterah has been consistently pursuing innovations since its inception. Through 'disruptive innovations' and 'continuous innovations,' we are driving the wide applications of mmWave radar chips in the automotive ADAS field. As of today, Calterah has shipped over 16 million mmWave radar chips, empowering more than 300 car models." At the summit, leaders from the China Energy & Automobile Media Group and representatives from companies including Calterah jointly released the "2024 Blue Paper for China New Energy Vehicle Industry". The blue paper covers the achievements and practices of China's new energy vehicle industry in 2024, covering aspects of policy regulations, products and technologies, corporate development, etc., aiming to provide references for government decisions, corporate strategic planning, and investor decisions.

Calterah's major disruptive innovation is breaking the traditional discrete mmWave radar architecture that consists of GaAs/SiGe MMICs and MCUs, by launching highly-integrated (System on Chip) SoC with Baseband Accelerator (BBA) for radar signal processing. The SoC significantly reduces system complexity and costs, fully innovating the development and implementation of mmWave radar sensors that are easy to use and compact with strong performance. Moreover, Calterah has successfully launched and mass-produced the world's first 77 GHz and 60 GHz mmWave radar SoCs with Antenna in Package (AiP), further reducing the sizes, power consumption, and costs of radar modules, expanding the application scenarios inside and outside vehicles for short-range radar, including door radar, Automatic Parking Assist (APA) radar, in-cabin radar, etc.

Calterah AiP SoCs Widely Applied in Emerging Short-Range Radar

Building on the results of disruptive innovations, Calterah has achieved technological upgrades and improved product performances via continuous innovations:

• Proprietary Radar Signal Processor (RSP) offers an upgraded architecture compared against the BBA, significantly enhancing the flexibility and processing performance of SoC systems;
• Innovative Flex-Cascading^® technology, applied in the CAL77C844-AR device from Calterah’s Andes family of radar SoCs, achieves imaging radar via cascading two chips and simplifies the BOM, providing strong hardware support for advanced intelligent driving-assistance systems;
• Calterah's leading-edge and most innovative Radiator on Package (RoP^®) technology provides mmWave signal interfaces, namely the radiators, and enhances the ESD robustness, offering better solutions for connecting waveguide antennas. Calterah’s Alps-Pro SoC and Andes SoCs with RoP^®, working waveguide antenna systems, can greatly improve radar detection performances and angular resolution.

With the global average number of mmWave radar per vehicle reaching 3, mmWave radar will continue to empower automotive active safety, providing reliable environmental sensing support for safe driving. Calterah’s mmWave radar SoC solutions, boasting both performance and cost advantages, are facilitating large-scale applications of ADAS, bringing safer and smarter driving-assistance experiences to more users.

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