Recently, the 4-day long electronica 2022, the world’s leading trade fair for electronics, has come to a successful end. This year’s electronica held in Munich, Germany brought together over 2100 exhibitors from almost 50 countries, among which Calterah made an international debut with the most comprehensive mmWave radar sensor chip product portfolio the industry had ever seen, expanding its global presence as an emerging player. The trade fair, too, turned out to be very productive for Calterah. The exhibits included massed produced products of 1st-generation transceivers, 2nd-generation SoCs, their corresponding development boards, and Calterah-inside mmWave radar modules developed by a top auto Tier-1 in China, attracting many visitors and potential customers from both auto and industrial fields. What was specially presented was the engineering samples of Calterah’s next-generation flagship product of the Andes family supporting high-performance 4D imaging radar functions in multi-chip cascade application. On the scene, the interactive demo of a vital sign detection and human tracking solution based on an industrial-grade SoC with the Antenna-in-Package (AiP) technology, in particular, was a huge appeal for visitors who had great interest in emerging industrial applications enabled by mmWave radar sensors. This exhibition at electronica 2022 has demonstrated Calterah’s determination and……

As a number of car models equipped with Calterah’s automotive-grade SoCs have entered into mass production recently, the high-performance corner radar solution with the DDM-MIMO function developed by Calterah based on an Alps mmWave radar SoC chip facilitates a safer and smarter driving experience. Recent years have seen the overwhelming installation rate of mmWave radar in smart cars as intelligent driving advances to higher levels. The radar solution employed by new cars is also evolving to a 5R (5 mmWave radar sensors) configuration, where in most cases 1 forward-looking radar sensor and 4 corner radar sensors are included, or even configurations with more radar devices. As a leading fabless provider of mmWave radar chips and solutions, Calterah has enabled the corner radar applications to 50+ car models, in the market and to be mass-produced. At present, many top Chinese and foreign passenger car brands have adopted Calterah’s corner radar solutions developed based on its automotive-grade mmWave radar SoCs. Calterah provides a multi-mode radar solution for corner radar applications, including high-performance DDM-MIMO for medium-range mode and TDM-MIMO for short-range mode, which enables real-time detection of objects beside, in front of and behind the vehicle, providing the information regarding range, relative velocity,……

On September 1, Calterah hosted its first Industrial Tech Day event, where a number of industrial customers were invited to join the in-depth technical sharing regarding how to implement product development based on Calterah’s industrial-grade SoCs. Calterah’s industrial-grade portfolio of mmWave radar SoCs includes the Rhine and Rhine-Mini product families, which are integrated with the highly configurable FMCW waveform generator, high speed ADCs, the radar signal processing baseband, CPU, and multiple peripheral interfaces. Such highly integrated industrial SoCs have significantly lowered the threshold of radar system development and shortened the time-to-market for customers. Moreover, the AiP (Antenna-in-Package) radar sensor chips in the industrial SoC portfolio further help customers save the investment in antenna development and reiteration and  eliminate the use of high-frequency laminates, bringing the advantages of a more compact size, a reduced cost, and easier development of radar modules. Besides, the mmWave radar ICs also feature unnoticeable and privacy-friendly detection. Owing to all those benefits, Calterah’s industrial-grade mmWave radar SoCs have been widely applied to various industrial segments, including intelligent living applications of smart home, elderly care, etc., intelligent city applications like smart transport systems, smart barrier-gate systems, security and surveillance, security check, etc., and industrial automation applications such……

On the morning of 19th July, the award ceremony of the Sixth China College IC Competition “Calterah Cup” of North China Division and the IC Innovation Transformation Summit took place in Beijing. As the title sponsor for the North China competition, Calterah attended the award ceremony and shared insights into mmWave radar development at the summit. The competition attracted more than 1000 students from universities in North China and 149 teams entered the final. After the oral defense session, the teams to be awarded were determined and then announced in the award ceremony. Then followed the IC Innovation Transformation Summit, which was live streamed and attracted scores of views from students and IC industry insiders. As a key sensor to autonomous driving, mmWave radar has evolved rapidly. In a speech delivered at the summit, Calterah’s CEO Dr. Chen Jiashu reviewed mmWave IC process evolution from GaAs to SiGe, and then to the current CMOS. CMOS has effectively simplified the system design of mmWave radar modules, significantly improved the integration level of chips, and lowered module-level costs and power consumption. Therefore, it has paved the way for the wide application of mmWave radar. Dr. Chen also pointed out two major trends……

In a global webinar held by International Wireless Industry Consortium (IWPC) at 11:00 am EST on February 23, Calterah delivered a keynote speech, “AiP Devices Enable Emerging Applications for the Automotive Market”. Worldwide, over 300 people from about 150 enterprises and institutions including well-known auto OEMs, top Tier-1 auto parts suppliers such as Aptiv, Bosch, and Continental, and companies in the upstream IC supply chain registered and attended the webinar to gain insights on AiP and discuss with Calterah the technology and its applications and development in emerging auto fields. In their keynote speech, Dr. Dian Wang, Calterah’s Director of EM and Manufacturing Technology introduced the advantages of AiP technology and its development in Calterah, and Product Marketing Manager Zheng Wang shed light on the challenges to existing auto radar solutions and how AiP devices enable emerging applications for the auto market. According to Dr. Wang, mmWave radar modules enabled by AiP ICs, compared to traditional ones, are more competitive, with higher integration level, smaller size, greater consistency and accuracy in antenna manufacturing, no external connection or radiation loss, less module-level design efforts and lower cost. In terms of antenna performances, Calterah allows high redundancy for impedance bandwidth and gain……

On December 3 and 4, China Auto Supply Chain Summit (CASCS) 2021 and the 6th China Lingxuan Awards Ceremony were held in Wuhan, China. Calterah was honored with the Lingxuan Award for Excellent Mass-Produced ICs for its Alps family of mmWave radar SoC chips.

On Oct. 20, Calterah unveiled two new mmWave radar chip product families, Alps-Mini and Rhine-Mini.   A Mini IC integrates an FMCW radar RF front-end transceiver system, which includes a dual-channel transmitter and a dual-channel receiver, capable of operation in the 59–64 GHz (for Rhine-Mini) or the 76–81 GHz (for Alps-Mini) band, with a 4 GHz continuous sweep and an output power up to 12 dBm. The chip also supports a maximum ADC sampling rate of 25 MS/s, peak search, and several algorithms to implement CFAR detection with a 512 KiB baseband SRAM. As an auto-grade product, it meets the requirements of the AEC-Q100 qualification and ISO 26262 ASIL-B standard, with two packages available, standard package and AiP (antenna in package). While resembling Alps and Rhine in the high-performance RF front-end, auto-grade operating temperature, reliability, and proprietary radar signal processing hardware accelerator, Mini is upgraded with a dual-core processor and a cybersecurity unit for encryption and compliance with desired cybersecurity standards. Furthermore, compared to Alps and Rhine, Mini is 40% smaller in size with a typical power consumption of 0.8 W and over 20% of the main chip cost reduction. The ICs have been made smaller, safer, smarter, and more……

While ADAS and autonomous driving technologies are rapidly evolving, the safety requirements automakers have for the IC industry are becoming increasingly complex, which fast-tracks active embracement of the automotive functional safety standard ISO 26262 and the cybersecurity standard lSO/SAE 21434 in the semiconductor industry. Recently, Calterah was invited by TÜV Rheinland Greater China to a seminar for exchanges on technologies, standards and practices of semiconductor functional safety and cybersecurity, where top-notch IC technical experts gathered together to share insights about key issues, such as IC functional safety and cybersecurity, and collaboration of automakers and chip design companies. At the seminar, Calterah’s Functional Safety Manager Song Yu shared Calterah’s experience of functional safety practices and lessons learned as a fabless design house from two perspectives: why chips with functional safety are required and how to develop such ICs. Figure 1. Audience at the Seminar Calterah achieved ISO 26262 functional safety management certification in March 2020 with its processes supporting development of ICs up to the ASIL-D level. In August 2021, Calterah further passed the assessment of TÜV Rheinland and its Alps family members of radar sensor SoC chips were certified as ASIL-B fully compliant, becoming China’s first to obtain the ISO……