This application note is meant to act as a guide to testing Radar sensors built using TI’s Radar chips. This document is expected to act as a high-level guide to help setup testing of radar sensor units during production. It captures generic requirements of radar testing; the actual test set up and software required to run the tests varies depending on the actual application of the radar. The user is expected to design the test software and determine the appropriate limits for any tests based on the application of the radar.
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Described below are the basic production checks done on a radar module at high-level:
Sensor performance validation can cover the entire range of sensor hardware and software subsystems. This document is not intended to serve as a reference for hardware bring up or validation. Instead, this section describes a high-level overview of the production line testing done on fully validated and characterized hardware to screen for issues on a production ready sensor. These issues generally arise from handling defects, environmental factors, assembly defects, and manufacturing defects.
After the assembly, the sensor board is powered up. The boot-up current drawn from the supply is measured and made sure that it is within the limits. The test program is executed which takes the sensor board through the sequence of tests described in the following sections.
The Radar Test GUI is a program that controls the Radar chip and processes the data that the Sensor captures. It is a custom program developed by the user suiting their end application and test hardware interface available.
Described below are key factory calibrations that help improve the performance of the sensor by compensating for imperfections introduced by the manufacturing process.