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Comment by wbl | Hacker News Reader

57 GHz? What sort of parts are they using to get a consumer product BOM cost?

They are working with Infineon, https://www.infineon.com/cms/en/product/promopages/soli/

Infineon has a 24Ghz demo board for $150, https://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/Infineon-Technologies/D... & https://www.infineon.com/cms/en/product/sensor/radar-sensor-...

Screw Infineon. They won’t provide the data sheet for their 80 GHz chipset, despite my buying $5k worth through their distributor.

Infineon support is truely world-class awful.

I’m looking at 100k with them this year and can’t get an answer to any technical question in any time frame. I probably wouldn’t select them again.

It's a custom-built chip according to https://atap.google.com/soli/

No idea what they are using but TI makes a bunch of parts that do radar in the MM wave band which is what that frequency is in.

http://www.ti.com/sensors/mmwave/overview.html

So I just looked up the prices on Mouser and Digikey for an amplifier or mixer in those frequencies, and boy are they expensive. The R&D spend must be enormous for them not to be making those parts in these frequencies as separate bits.

I mean, you can make a RADAR with a single transistor, 2 diodes, an exotic but off the shelf VCO, and clever transmission lines. I doubt the R&D cost is very high for for the MMIC here.

TI is making a 60 GHz RADAR in a CMOS process. I’m sure R&D costs were heavy, but production will be cheap.

https://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1333330

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