Continium Leads €15M EDF Radar Project Bid with ADAM Semiconductor Proposal
Continium Technologies s.r.o Slovakia delivered EDF (European Defense Fund) 15 Million € project application in the category Radar EDF-2022-RA-SENS-ART: Advanced radar technologies, leading a consortium of 9 subjects, including our partners Beyond Semiconductor, ELDES and Ilmsens GmbH from overall 7 European countries. Our project application competitor is the Tiresyas consortium consisting of giants Airbus, Thales, Indra, Leonardo, Hensoldt, Saab.
The R&D project topic of our ADAM project covers a semiconductor chip integration of multi-channel radar system covering the whole signal path from antenna, RF frontend via data converters (ADC, DAC) down to digital post-processing in FPGA/ASIC using resilient European semiconductor foundries to achieve market independence.
Research towards design implementation of reconfigurable digitalization system (data converters: ADC in Rx, DAC in Tx) with focus on lowest power consumption and small chip area implementation: feasibility studies of different circuit design topologies and different ADC architectures, to optimally adjust signal bandwidth or digitalization signal bit-accuracy to save power consumption, this way paving the path towards true multi-channel array integration on a single semiconductor chip.
Research design studies for different A/D converter architectures: comparison of Nyquist vs. Continuous-Time Sigma-Delta ADC for broadband wireless application; different spectral characteristics e.g. lowpass vs. bandpass spectral selectivity, application of reconfigurable digital filtering applications, feasibility studies towards lowest power consumption in analog and digital domain. The circuit design of the selected ADC architecture in the selected semiconductor technology and its prototyping fabrication.
In the frame of IC/chip design starting with single or dual-channel wireless receiver integration, the goal is to integrate multi-channel radar and communication receivers on the chip to allow true digital phase arrays (e.g. up to 16 or 32 channel MIMO: 16x1 or 8x2 or 4x4 or 8x4 receiver array): circuit design of MIMO receiver phase arrays consisting of RF-frontends (pre-amplifiers and mixers) and data converters (ADC) and digital postprocessing. Verification simulation and hardware (MIMO demonstrators) implementation of selected solution from the above mentioned feasibility studies to prove the system functionality of reconfigurable, the LPI approach for different radar and communication configurations.
