Last decade strong technological effort provided the availability on the market of cheap chips integrating a full 77 GHz radar system, including the RF and the signal processing sections, which potentially offer an infinite variety of applications beyond the original one, i.e., automotive safety and autonomous drive. However an analogous effort on the radar antenna is yet to come; therefore the radar performance is still quite limited, thus preventing the massive transfer of the same technology in other areas of application, where reliability requirements are much more demanding.

High performance radar antennas are realised with large reflectors or in slotted waveguide technology, which are bulky, expensive and not directly integrated with the radar electronic. However, the recently proposed Substrate Integrated Waveguide (SIW) technology could potentially offer the same performance of traditional metallic waveguide antennas but realised in the light-weight, low-cost, large-scale, printed circuit board technology, also allowing the direct integration with the front end electronic. Therefore the project aims to develop the technological process to produce high performance antennas in SIW technology for millimetre wave radar sensors.