Pulsed UWB Radar Design

Ultra-wideband (UWB) signals and systems have been actively investigated over the past decade for both medical and industrial radar applications. Recent UWB radars, capable of measuring distance have been investigated most since only time information needs to be recovered. Targeted applications include object detection, collision avoidance in car radar or vital signs monitoring. For high accuracy in advanced applications, it is however needed to sample the entire UWB pulse directly instead of only performing energy detection since the former signal has more information about the target besides its location. This allows a visualization of the inside of objects and exploit the true benefit of electromagnetic (EM) imaging. For instance, in the application of breast cancer detection, this would reveal more information of the tumor and enhance dielectric contrast. In this work, the proposed application of remotely sensing the effect of radiation is investigated by proof-of-concept measurements. For communication purposes, UWB channel models are widely investigated in terms of bit error rate (BER). For radar applications, few models are available to derive hardware specifications and analyze the impact of different error sources. In this PhD we developed hardware for UWB based remote sensing with a focus on skin dosimetry.