Metawave First to Demonstrate 77 GHz Electronically Scanned Metamaterial Array for Autonomous Driving

Palo Alto, CA, Jan. 30, 2018 -- Metawave, innovative wireless technology startup disrupting self-driving and 5G industries, today announced it was the first to demonstrate a metamaterials-based electronically scanned array at 77 GHz, a key-enabling technology required to realize a high-resolution automotive radar. Metawave’s WARLORD™ radar core technology platform was demonstrated at CES2018 earlier this month with great success, where the Company hosted more than 200 global automotive industry executives.

Metawave WARLORD (TM): Advancing the future of smart radar for autonomous driving

“The challenge here is the FCC-allocated frequency of operation – 77 GHz. At this frequency, all those skilled in the art know that it is nightmarish to build any kind of electronic components,” said Metawave CTO and co-founder Dr. Bernard Casse. “Thus, many people were very skeptical that an emerging start-up could realize a metamaterial scanned array at 77 GHz, let alone in this timeframe, but we proved them wrong.”

The prototypes, which the team built and carried out in the span of 5 months, showed the blueprint of a new kind of high-resolution and intelligent radar integrating AI, operating at 77 GHz, with true beamsteering used to accurately determine range and speed of objects, as well as classify them, and accurately interpret the world around the car. The radar demos are a mix of sophisticated vector network analyzers and horn antennas, to toy cars moving along a racetrack being detected by the radar and displayed on a dashboard. The ultimate goal is to build superior radars possessing vision, speed, and intelligence.

“I’m very proud of what the team has been able to accomplish in such a short time, beating all odds” said Metawave CEO and co-founder Dr. Maha Achour. “A lot was riding on this demonstration at CES 2018 for us – and we are very pleased with the results and invite all strategic partners or customers to our Silicon Valley headquarters to experience the demo live.”

Metawave is currently focused on strategically partnering with the leading automotive suppliers, top car companies, and the world’s most innovative organizations in the autonomous driving space to build out its radar platform for deployment. The company is chipset agnostic and will be announcing various partnerships throughout 2018 to support the innovative radar advancements.

“High resolution radars are a requisite sensor in the multi-modal sensor suite for automated driving systems, and we were very excited to see a myriad of advanced technologies introduced by   startup companies such as Metawave,” said Ritesh Tyagi, Head of the Silicon Valley Automotive Innovation Center (SVIC) at Infineon Technologies. “We were quite impressed with Metawave and its approach to redefining the future of automotive radar – the demonstration at CES with the Infineon chipset was exciting to see and reiterates our commitment to foster innovation in automated driving technologies with innovative products and partnerships.” Infineon Technologies AG is a world leader in semiconductor solutions that make life safer, smarter and greener.”

Later this month at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Metawave will be showing SABER™ to telecommunications giants interested in deploying advanced hybrid antennas. SABER™ high-gain antenna is optimal because of its highly-directive beam which can be focused and steered in real-time over wide angles and with large bandwidths. SABER™ eliminates the need for expensive and power-hungry phase shifters, because it’s phase shifting architecture is realized by proprietary adaptive metamaterials—leveraging leading-edge optimization and control algorithms.

About WARLORD™
(W-band Advanced Radar for Long-range Object Recognition and Detection)
Autonomous cars operation depends on both the maturity of the decision-making algorithms and performance of its critical sensors – camera, LIDAR, radar. The only sensor that can operate at full speed and in all-weather conditions is a radar sensor. Radar can detect, track, and image objects at long ranges, and it can process received signals 1000x faster than today’s digital-only radar. Metawave is building a new breed of high-resolution, imaging radars, capable of reconstructing its environment better than LIDAR, and interpreting the world around it like humans. Metawave’s radar platform uses engineered metamaterial structures capable of beamforming and beamsteering, and powered by an Artificial Intelligence (AI) engine that detects, recognizes, tracks, and classifies objects. WARLORD’s performance is analogous to large military phased array radar systems, without the complex circuitry, high cost, and massive size and weight. WARLORD offloads the bulk of the signal processing complexity to analog, where Metawave has built a new architecture that is an order of magnitude faster (microsecond speeds), while enabling significant size, weight, power, and cost reduction.

About Metawave
Metawave is a wireless technology company that will revolutionize the future of wireless communications and radar sensing. Leveraging adaptive metamaterials and Artificial Intelligence, Metawave’s primary focus is to build intelligent beamsteering radars for autonomous driving. Changing the way automakers think about radar, Metawave is building high-performance radars capable of 3D imaging and vehicle-to-vehicle communication, making cars safer, smarter, and more connected. In parallel, Metawave is developing smart beamsteering antennas for 4G and 5G networks to provide faster networks and near-instant connectivity for billions of users. Metawave’s current flagship beamsteering technology platform was developed at PARC, a Xerox company. Founded in 2017, Metawave is located in the heart of Silicon Valley. Please visit the Metawave website at www.metawave.co, follow us on Twitter @metawavecorp, on Facebook, or contact us at [email protected].

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PR Contact | Kelly Brieger | 650.704.1748 | www.metawave.co | [email protected]