On Tuesday 8th of December 2009, the Kick Off Meeting of the European project SUCCESS took place at IHP, Frankfurt (Oder), Germany. More than 15 researchers met to draw up the project and to set up the work plan for the following three years of research.
The main objective of the SUCCESS project is to develop a technology platform and best-practice design methods to enable the breakthrough of silicon mm-Wave sensors for high-volume applications.
Silicon technology has made tremendous progress towards ever higher device cut‐off frequencies. Nowadays all RF components up to 120 GHz can be realized in silicon. Monolithic integration of the digital baseband processor, data converters, and mm-Wave circuitry on the same chip enables the fabrication of complete mm-wave sensor electronics at cost of well below 1 €. Furthermore mm-wavelengths radio waves result in mm-size antennas that can be integrated in the chip package. Hence complete miniaturized mm-Wave sensor systems can be realized using a System-in-Package approach. Low cost and miniaturization of mm-wave sensor systems will enable a great variety of distance sensing applications such as industrial sensing (distance, speed, material characterisation), public and private safety (motion detectors, even behind wall paper), automotive (wheel suspension measurement, pedestrian safety), replacement of cheap ultra-sonic sensors (distance measurement) and others.
The main challenges that limit the penetration of mm-wave sensing technology into high-volume markets so far is the costly mm-wave packaging and the complicated mm-wave production testing. To overcome these problems the three main challenges and objectives of the SUCCESS project are: To develop a low-cost mm-wave System-in-Package based on plastic SMD-type packages that integrate a planar antenna together with the SiGe BiCMOS technology. To realize the System-on-Chip integration of a digital-controlled mm-wave frontend and asynchronous digital baseband processor design. To develop novel methods for mm-wave Built-in-Self-Test and mm-wave sensor System-in-Package test.
The SUCCESS consortium consists of nine partners made up of research centres, universities and companies of six countries. The project has been financed by the 7th Framework Programme of the European Commission and has a budget of over 4.5 Million Euros for the next three years. The partners are the following ones: IHP GmbH, Robert Bosch GmbH, the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and Silicon Radar GmbH from Germany, ST Microelectronics from France, SELMIC from Finland, Hightec MC AG from Switzerland, Evatronix from Poland, and the University of Toronto from Canada.
SUCCESS (Silicon-based Ultra Compact Cost-Efficient System Design for mmWave-Sensors) – http://www.success-project.eu