Sense2GoL Pulse Development Kit

The Sense2GoL Pulse radar demo kit is a demonstration platform for Infineon’s silicon-germanium 24 GHz radar chipset BGT24LTR11. It consists of two boards: the main Radar Baseboard XMC4700 and a radar front end board BGT24LTR11 Shield.

The Sense2GoL Pulse board is designed to evaluate the capabilities of the BGT24LTR11 IC, comprising one transmit and one receive channel with the XMC4700 microcontroller utilizing Infineon’s powerful, free-of charge toolchain DAVE™ for microcontroller programming.

For more Information, check Sense2GoLPulse Product Page

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a. Radar Baseboard XMC4700

The Sense2GoL Pulse radar system is a demo platform for Infineon’s 24 GHz BGT24LTR11 radar chipset. It consists of two boards: the Radar Baseboard XMC4700 and a radar front-end board, BGT24LTR11 Shield. This section gives an overview of the Radar Baseboard XMC4700 hardware platform.

a1. Overview

The Radar Baseboard XMC4700 is a generic sensor interface for Infineon’s 24 GHz radar sensors. The central unit of the XMC4700 32-bit ARM® Cortex™-M4 based microcontroller board can perform radar data processing or forward the sensor data to a USB interface, serial interface or an Arduino interface. The board is designed to allow customers to carry out prototyping and system integrations as well as initial product feature evaluations. An onboard debugger with licensed firmware from SEGGER allows easy debugging over USB. Infineon’s powerful, free-of-charge toolchain DAVE™ can be used for programming the XMC4700 microcontroller. 

a2. Block Diagram

The Radar Baseboard XMC4700 embeds Infineon’s XMC4700, 32-bit ARM® Cortex™-M4 based microcontroller. It can be used to perform radar data processing, configure the board’s peripherals and RF shield management, and enable radar data communication via a USB or serial interface.

The Sense2GoL Pulse firmware is running in the XMC4700 microcontroller and configures the following peripherals:

• Analog Digital Converter (ADC)
• Direct Memory Access (DMA)
• General-Purpose Input Output (GPIO)
• USIC for I2C serial interface
• CCU8/4 for timer and PWM control signals
• Capture and Compare Unit (CCU)
• Hardware interrupts 
• USB interface for host communication

b. BGT24LTR11 Shield

The radar shield as shown in Figure 4 contains the following:

• RF part: consists of the Infineon 24 GHz radar MMIC BGT24LTR11 and includes micro-strip patch antennas for the TX and RX sections.
• S&H part: consists of SPST switches and hold capacitors to sample and hold the analog I/Q signals from the MMIC using a control signal from the microcontroller.
• Analog amplifier part: consists of two amplifier stages, used to smooth the sampled I/Q signals from S&H circuitry and amplify them for the digital part.
• EEPROM part: can be used to store data such as board identifier information, and RF shield hardware settings.

c. Sense2GoL Pulse Board

Figure 5 shows the Sense2GoL Pulse radar system hardware platform, which consists of two boards: the Radar Baseboard XMC4700 and the BGT24LTR11 Shield radar front-end board. The BGT24LTR11 Shield should be plugged into the bottom side of the Radar Baseboard XMC4700 using the two connectors X2 and X3 (cf. figure 2). For more information see Sense2GoLPulse Product Page