Nieke Roos
18 April 2019

Dutch semiconductor manufacturer NXP has announced a new strategic collaboration and investment agreement with Hawkeye Technology, a company at the forefront of the Chinese automotive radar sector. Hawkeye will offer its deep 77 GHz expertise, an engineering team and a state-of-the-art lab complex within Southeast University in Nanjing, China. Together, the two companies will create NXP-based reference designs for the Chinese automotive market. Financial details have not been disclosed.

China’s automotive radar sensor market is growing at nearly two times the world market rate. Current automotive market analysis projects that by 2020, radar technology will be in fifty percent of all newly produced cars. These robust appraisals are driven in part by the China New Car Assessment Program (C-NCAP), which mandates the further implementation and innovation of radar in safety-related applications such as blind spot detection, automatic emergency braking, front and rear cross-traffic detection, and precise environmental mapping.

NXP radar_web
Illustration: NXP

NXP is a pioneer and market leader in RFCMOS-based 77 GHz automotive radar sensors, a key technology in the next phase of the advanced driving assistance roadmap. This leading-edge technology will continue to develop to address the detection and classification of vulnerable road users, full and surround view applications and the ultimate solution: imaging radar, which could in time replace more expensive and bulky technologies. The collaboration with Hawkeye and Southeast University will address important research areas in automotive radar and help the Chinese automotive market innovate with system-level solutions and radar reference designs.

“Hawkeye and Southeast University have established a joint research center focusing on vehicle millimeter-wave radar technologies,” says professor Hong Wei, IEEE fellow and director of Southeast University’s State Key Laboratory of Millimeter Waves. “At the same time, we have launched long-term research on millimeter-wave multi-system radar imaging, new millimeter-wave antenna arrays and new millimeter-wave circuit structures. Our latest research results will continue to be introduced in Hawkeye’s future designs and radar products.”

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Hawkeye CEO Alex Shi adds: “The fast development of ADAS and autonomous driving technologies has raised new requirements for vehicle-based millimeter-wave radar. Through our long-term cooperation with State Key Laboratory of Millimeter Waves, Hawkeye has accumulated engineering talent and rich product experience in terms of manufacturability and reliability of auto electronic products. By partnering with NXP, we will focus on providing advanced millimeter-wave radar system-level solutions as well as comprehensive technical support for Tier 1 customers.”