Comparison of actual performance between CDMA and DDMA waveforms in vehicle radar application

The Millimeter-wave radar has become an important sensor for advanced driver assistance systems due to its advantages such as environmental adaptability, low cost and detection accuracy. Most of current vehicle radars use Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) technology to obtain better angular resolution. Among all MIMO radar waveforms, both CDMA and DDMA meet the requirements of next-generation high-performance radars and may become the mainstream radar waveforms in the future. Performance comparisons of the two waveforms are scattered in a large number of literatures and they are all from a theoretical point of view. At present, there is no literature comparing the practical performance of CDMA and DDMA. AWR6843 is a high-precision millimeter-wave radar sensor widely used in automotive safety, environmental monitoring and other applications. This SOC chip has been adopted in numerous automotive radar products. Thus, based on the data collected by a TI's AWR6843 radar evaluation board, this paper compares the performance of CDMA and DDMA in terms of waveform orthogonality, parameter estimation capability, and processing complexity. In addition, the paper discusses the merits and demerits of each technology and the limitations of its practical application, which provides an important reference for the optimization and technical route selection of future radar systems.